Where 'bull market' and 'bear market' come from

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2022

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Have you ever wondered where the terms 'bull' and 'bear' markets originated from? Today on the show, we're journeying back to the 1700s to find out how a particular financial event popularized these animal terms.

Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:12.0	We live in a bear market.
0:13.9	We used to live in a bull market.
0:15.6	That was nice.
0:16.6	Stocks were up.
0:18.0	That bull statue on Wall Street stood proudly as a mascot for ever growing wealth.
0:24.6	But it didn't last forever.
0:26.4	The stock market has declined by more than 20% from its peak.
0:30.7	That means a bear market.
0:33.2	Bears and bulls.
0:35.3	These animal terms in finance, I think it's fair to say that here at the indicator, they've
0:38.8	always captured our imagination.
0:41.6	So we started wondering now that everybody's talking about it, where did these terms come
0:46.4	from?
0:47.4	Like, were they just the invention of CNBC or the Wall Street Journal?
0:51.7	Or is there a story behind them?
0:53.4	In the answer, we learned doesn't lie in Wall Street at all.
0:57.2	Instead, we need to take a cruise across the Atlantic Ocean and a time machine back 300
1:02.2	years to learn about the very first widely anointed bull and then bear market.
1:09.4	This is Ian DeGaerter from Planet Money.
1:10.8	I'm Darien Woods.
1:12.2	And I'm Adrian Mah.
	...

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