Today's young can barely believe how obsessed everyone was with investing and financial markets 10 years ago. Back in 2009, armies of television pundits used to shout about stocks all day long, while up-to-the-minute prices whirred across screens. Some financial analysts were actually revered. What a difference a decade of sub-par economic growth and low returns can make. Almost nobody is interested in investing now. Hard work and stashing one's money under the mattress, preferably in a mix of high and low-denomination bills, is considered the road to wealth in the west these days.
Few should be surprised at this change. Japan went through a similar decade after its own market bubble burst at the end of the 1980s. From loving equities, Mrs Watanabe barely touched a share again for 20 years. It is fitting then that, while the S&P 500 trades at exactly the same level that it finished December 2009, Japanese stocks have more than doubled. It took the Great Recession for the likes of Sony and Kirin finally to embrace “shareholder value”. But once they did, boy – returns on equity have skyrocketed.
Yet while the teens marked the return of Japan, it has also been a decade that emerging wonder-markets of yesteryear would rather forget. Bubbles bursting are nothing new. But investors underplayed the importance of western consumers to developing world economies. The big lesson they learnt is that embryonic, rapidly evolving markets should never have traded with risk premiums barely above stable, mature ones. And what is left to say about poor China? Historians will be digging through the rubble of that economic and political experiment for years.