Don’t Count on Another Roaring ’20s Stock Market
A century ago, the market was the cheapest on record going back at least 140 years. Today’s, by contrast, has been more expensive only once before.
A roaring repeat is unlikely.
Photographer: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
A lot of comparisons have been made in recent months between the start of the Roaring 1920s and the new decade underway. The similarities are indeed striking. Then, as now, the U.S. was digging out from the public health and economic fallout of a global pandemic even as a wave of new technology was set to transform the country’s political, social and economic landscape.
Those similarities — the Spanish Flu that began in 1918 and the Covid-19 pandemic last year, and mass adoption of electrification and the combustion engine a century ago and the flood of new technology reordering life today — have ignited speculation that another Roaring ’20s is underway. That may be true when it comes to technology or the economy. But the Roaring ’20s also featured a booming stock market, and whatever else may be in store this decade, it’s not likely to include a replay of the raging 1920s bull market.