“The market always, and I mean always, goes up. Not each year. Not each month. Not each week and certainly not each day. But relentlessly up.”
When those words first appeared, just over a decade ago on the blog of the American personal finance expert JL Collins, there were good reasons to doubt them. Investors, still reeling from the economic heart attack that was the 2008 banking crisis, were again confronted with the prospect of financial armageddon, as Europe wrestled with a debt crisis that threatened to shatter the world’s largest trading bloc.
In the years since Collins’ post, ‘the market’ faced a life-halting pandemic, repeated geopolitical and supply chain shocks, and what some have described as the start of the end of globalisation.