Insights

When the Dow Jones Industrial Average (Dow) crossed a new high of 40,000 in May, it achieved a milestone that appeared implausible given recent popular sentiment. Just two years earlier, central banks were still on the path of aggressively hiking rates to curb inflation. Gloomy equity market forecasts abounded.

This question emerged from a recent study analyzing the text of 200 million newspapers spanning almost two centuries. It concluded that both economic and non-economic sentiment have substantially declined over the past 50 years, despite far fewer economic setbacks.

It has been 45 years since BusinessWeek declared the “Death of Equities,” warning that rampant inflation was “destroying the stock market” and “to regard the death of equities as a near-permanent condition.”1 These dramatic prognostications haven’t subsided over time, likely because negative news is more appealing. When one news website decided to report exclusively good news for a day, it lost two-thirds of its readership.2 Our brains are hardwired to react more strongly to negative information.

Chances are “you might live longer than you think.” This was the longevity message of a Wall Street Journal article earlier this year.1 Indeed, we are living longer and healthier lives — half of those born today are expected to live to the centenarian age of 100.2 And, though the average Canadian’s life expectancy is around 82, if you reach the age of 75, you’re likely to live until age 87. Our life expectancy increases as we get older.3

It has been said that millennials — those born from 1980 to 1994 — were the first generation worse off than their parents financially. Skyrocketing housing prices, a higher cost of education and a challenging economy, among others, were to blame. And while things didn’t look so great for the millennials a decade ago, recent studies suggest a different story.