It really depends on how close you think we are to the bottom. Of course no one can say for sure, but as someone who came of age in the first dotcom bubble, and now finds himself surrounded by a generation of young engineers who has never known anything but a bull market, I think it's worth pointing out that the S&P has only fallen to Feb 2021 levels. We are still well above where the market was just prior to the pandemic, at which point we had already experienced a historic decade plus bull run on tech stocks which was then amplified by quarantine and everything needing to be done remotely.

I wouldn't be surprised if we're flat or down further 12-24 months from now.

Yeah, that's possible too. I'm certainly no economic expert, but my understanding is that bear markets typically last less than 2 years on average. But who knows? Your guess is as good as mine.

> bear markets typically last less than 2 years on average

According to a quick Google search, bull markets also last four to six years on average. The current bull market has been going on for about thirteen years now.

We're at a generational change in political control for the first time in four decades, in uncharted territory with low interest rates (as you note), and looking at increased wealth inequality and as assets have raged unchecked (same as previous point basically).

I think our conventional wisdom is failing here because we have not considered that the voting preferences will rapidly change over the next 8 years. Of course, the massive buffer there to my theory is Millennials will be the ones inheriting the bulk of these assets over the same time frame. Perhaps they will decide generational wealth isn't so bad once it is in their accounts.

Maybe Millennials won’t, but Gen Z polls favor progressive politics by wider margin than ahead of Millennials.

Gen Zs political lean has not softened as they age into their late 20s, as it did with Millennials and older.

Minus their elders, Gen X is not a powerful enough political force in another decade to avoid capitulating on new new deal type government. Gen X is pre Information Age, no where near as savvy and aware of how technological society works, raised by a still very God-headed society (the US recently just crossed a threshold of <50% believing in higher powers; was >80% around 2000).

Urban growth has seen fewer teens get a license. Pee wee leagues participation was down before covid, as parents worried about future health, and cratered due to covid. Some unis have ended early education programs due to low enrollment. Essential workers are not staying in essential jobs as long, as they’ve seen they’re just a target for abuse by people who can’t feed themselves. 80% of nurses are considering leaving the field as they’ve just seen Americans rely on them like a mother rather than care for themselves.

There are a lot of trends that are really interesting to see, and the big gorilla is a bunch of senile leaders like Feinstein who apparently forgets peoples names minutes after introductions, and others who can’t understand ideas that aren’t presented in folksy slang. American agency is a lot like her memory; giving way to something else.

Demographically you might be right about where the majority of the population leans. But it doesn’t matter. Between the “small state bias” of the electoral college and gerrymandering, the minority are going to rule for the foreseeable future.

The Democrats have now lost the Presidency twice in the last thirty years while winning the popular votes and are underrepresented in congress in comparison to the popular vote.

Most Americans disapprove of the recent Supreme Court ruling on abortion - even Republicans.

> Gen Zs political lean has not softened as they age into their late 20s, as it did with Millennials and older.

A quick search for generational boundaries put the consensus at around 1997, which would make the oldest 25 years old. I don't think there is any data to analyze about how their leanings will change. They've barely left college and during the most significant global crisis of most living people's lifetimes.

> Gen X is pre Information Age, no where near as savvy and aware of how technological society works

I'm Gen X, and went to public school in flyover country 30+ years ago. I've never been in a classroom that didn't have a computer, or to a school that wasn't connected to the internet. I've still got a folder of old elementary school grade reports and standardized test outputs that are just dot matrix printouts from a server in the state capital.

When my older siblings were teenagers (35-40 years ago), a lot of the popular teen movies included scenes in which the protagonists connected to the internet from their home computer, usually in their own bedroom.

When my father was in college 50 years ago, he used networked computers to write statistics programs and submit them to a central server on campus for his psychology homework.

60+ years ago, my grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley. Houses were expensive back then, too.

Us old folks are perfectly at home in the Information Age. It's the Disinformation Age we're having trouble with. But I have a feeling that your generation is having a worse time of it; you just don't realize it yet.

As an early 30's Millennial, my feelings about the "Disinformation Age," which may be a useful term, is my generation's internet has always been seeping with disinformation from my memories of unfettered broadband access starting in the late 90's/early 2000's, while our parents had no clue what we were up to. Many of us learned a lot of lessons over the past decades and have been horrified to see our parents fall for the tricks we did when we were 12. That does not mean we won't fail similarly to the next generation of charlatans, but I think our political moment in the US supports my view.

I'll also note that what used to be "As Seen on TV" products are now marketed with Instagram-chic, so the shifting target of marketing is clear. I can't help but wonder if every generation hasn't seen the same since at least radio.

Not a clue on GenX, but don't let that stop you.....

Demographics are the only real broad brush crystal ball - we are now for the first time on the downward slope of the generational wave of increased consumption that the baby boomers historically brought to the consumer driven end of the globe, a different paradigm will emerge.

As for inheritance, you can almost make a certain bet that once the scope of transference starts to reach substantial proportions that the worlds governments will find novel and pervasive ways of garnishing taxes from such movements of wealth.

> We're at a generational change in political control for the first time in four decades

Where and how?

Read Ray Dalio's Essays on the Long Term Debt Cycle. No one knows how this will end for sure, but it is a unique time in history.

> The current bull market has been going on for about thirteen years now.

There was a bear market during the 2020 recession.

"Your guess is as good as mine."

Exactly right. If you look at Yahoo news, you'll find several articles from 'experts' daily that predict either imminent doom or a sudden rise in stock prices. On the same day.

The great John Bogle said "Nobody knows nothing", meaning that nobody can predict where the market is going in the short term. (Long term, it's an up-and-right trend.) Your guess is absolutely as good as anyone else's.

The following article will give you some perspective

"Bear markets: what they are, how long they last, and how to invest during them"

https://monevator.com/bear-markets/

And of course any single stock doesn't have to correlate with the performance of the market.

The market as a whole might bounce back, but that doesn't mean that a specific stock will.

then they can just switch jobs again. It's like a mortgage, keep refinancing until you hit bottom.

It's simple, you stack rank your options.

Since you can only have one employer at a time, everyone from number 2 down is cut.