Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us.

This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it.

I'm your host, David Stein.

Today is episode 521.

It's titled, Is the rest of the world Selling America?

For decades, the U.S. has been a favored investment destination, drawing capital from every

corner of the globe. But today, the narrative appears to be shifting. Robert Schiller, in his

2019 book Narrative Economics, wrote, a key proposition of this book is that economic fluctuations are substantially driven

by contagion of oversimplified and easily transmittable variance of economic narratives. In other words,

economies and financial markets are driven by stories. David Tuckett, who's trained in economics,

medical sociology, and psychoanalysis wrote, when investors buy, sell or hold all classes of

financial assets. What they're doing is constructing narratives about their future relationships

with an imagined idea, what they think will happen.

We all do this. We do it subconsciously. And stories can change. What I want to do now is go through

three economic regimes over the past 30 years. This time span covers my investment career. And we'll look at the stories that drove what was

going on and how that was reflected in financial outcomes. The first period is July 1995 to July

2001, six-year period. I began my investment career in July 1995. I joined F.EG

advisors as an analyst slash consultant. And I remember that the U.S. stock market rose 37% in

1995. And over that six-year period, this was during the dot-com bubble, where there was

internet mania. Stock markets were soaring in the U.S. was attracting gobs of foreign capital to

invest in many of these startups and in the U.S. market overall.

Growth stock investing trounced value investing. And that capital flowing into the U.S.

...