Ya... I saw that article. It's one of the ones I was thinking about when I wrote the previous posts.
For all the reasons I stated back in April, I did not expect Covid to lead to a Great Depression, but I did agree it was a possibility. By the standards of The Core, I was an optimistic outlier, but I would NEVER have considered the the possibility that the S&P 500 would close the year at a record high.
I don't watch the markets or even the general economy very closely, so there could be a lot of faulty memory and selection bias in what follows. But still, there are only three times where I felt that I just couldn't make sense of what was happening.
1999: absurd, stupid, ridiculous companies offering services that I couldn't imagine many people wanting, losing money like mad and planning to make it up on volume and yet enjoying sky high valuations. I just couldn't figure that out. As a historian (and not at all an investor), the explanation that "This time it's different," struck me as very unlikely. It's one of the few other times I made a good investment call. My grandmother died in 1999 and I got a small inheritance that friends told me to put in the market. I paid off my student loans instead. That decision was less a function of my great foresight than the simple facts that I didn't really understand why the market was going up so fast and I hate having debt, so I paid off the debt, assuming I would regret it in the long run.
2006: We had only recently become full-time gainfully employed after a period of dissertation writing and some budget travel and the bank said we could qualify for a $2,000,000 loan for a house. This struck us as absurd because there was absolutely no way we could pay that back. Other than not taking out a loan I couldn't repay, I only had a vague sense that something was wrong with the housing market, so I didn't take any action.
2021: many of the people I know are unemployed, Covid is far from vanquished, the efficacy of the vaccine is not really proven on a population scale, Americans are still banned from travel to Europe, in law (though not in practice) people can't travel to or within California without quarantine, and a lodging listing service just blew away all expectations with its IPO and the stock market is at a record high.
I don't want to imply in any way that I called it in 1999 or 2008. I was not nearly that prescient. I was not expecting a collapse in the stock market or the housing market and most definitely did not predict those things. I was as surprised as anyone.
It's only in retrospect that I was able to correlate my feeling of, "Huh??" with future events. But having had that experience twice and now sitting here a third time thinking, "Huh???" it is making me quite nervous.
