As the Roman philosopher and statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca once said: “Yield not to adversity; trust not to prosperity; keep before your eyes the full scope of Fortune’s power, as if she would surely do whatever is in her power to do.” This sentiment resonates as we examine the current economic landscape shaped by Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
How do you view the glass — half full or half empty? This question aptly captures the dual nature of sentiment today. On one hand, our standard of living is among the highest in history, fuelled by technological advances, improved quality of life, substantial and growing wealth and increased life expectancy. On the other hand, this progress is overshadowed by rising costs of living, heavy debt burdens, declining productivity and ongoing geopolitical tensions.
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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.
