zlacker

Much of what was "lost" was paper profits, artificially inflated in the first place, due to extremely cheap credit and massive demand spikes due to companies buying back enormous amounts of their own stock. Limited wage growth over the past decade, and reduction of benefits helped too.

From a time horizon, US stock markets have only regressed 3 years, and both the S&P and DJIA are about double where they were 10 years ago, while NASDAQ is still higher than triple its early 2010 value. Market leaders like FB, MSFT, GOOGL, NFLX, AAPL have only fallen to levels they were at in 2019.

You simply can't just focus on the decline without taking a hard look at how markets reached those heights in the first place and evaluating whether they were sustainable. Well you can, as you did, but it would be disingenuous.