Over the Rainbow

From USA Today:

The Dow is back. All the way back. At the opening bell Tuesday, the benchmark index sailed past its all-time closing high of 14,164.53 set back in October 2007.

The Dow Jones industrial average opened above its record closing high set Oct. 9, 2007, erasing the 54% loss it suffered in the brutal 2007-2009 bear market. In the first few minutes of trading, the Dow was up almost 100 points.

We didn’t know the Dow Jones was hitting an all-time high in the fall of 2007 that it would take years to revisit. We didn’t know that the biggest financial storm since the Great Depression was less than a few months away.

A lot has happened between then and now. We’ve learned a lot of lessons. We’ve seen massive reversals in fortune for some of the most powerful firms, people and entities. We’ve seen people lose their homes and jobs, whole industries remake themselves and a massive shift in the political balance of power from one party to the other.

Babies have been born, businesses have been started, fashion trends have come and gone, new technology has subsumed the place of old technology. We found new things to do when old things were no long profitable or worth our time. We paid down some debt and changed the way we shopped. We picked up additional skills and contacts and bits of knowledge along the way.  We found out that a lot of people and institutions we’d trusted – unquestioningly for so many years – were full of shit all along.

And for most of us, life just went on.

And now, here we are above the old closing highs on the Dow Jones Industrial Average – rightly or wrongly the the most widely-acknowledged financial symbol in America, perhaps the world. We come to this place in some ways stronger than before and in some ways weaker, but we arrive nonetheless. The wounds have healed but the scars are still showing, and in some places the stitches too. Nobody said it had to be pretty.

I can’t tell you what happens next, because this is something new. The eighth best bull market of all time, a 137% gain from trough to peak inside of four years. And now the biggest index of the biggest stocks is trading at levels never seen before.

We are over the rainbow.

Read Also:

Dow 14,000: Then and Now (TRB)