Bull and Bear Markets in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The bull and bear markets of this century have suggested that large stock market swings reflect irrational “fads and fashions.” We argue instead that investors perceived shifts in the long-run rate of future growth and that stock prices are sufficiently sensitive to expectations about the future that these perceived shifts plausibly generated the swings of the twentieth century. We document that analysts often viewed as “smart money” assessed fundamentals, based on their perceptions of future economic growth, in a way that tracked decade-to-decade swings closely.