Submitted by Taps Coogan on the 18th of June 2018 to The Sounding Line.

The following graphic. from Visual Capitalist, details the six longest bull markets since the end of World War II.

Having endured since 2009, the current bull market is the second longest in American history and has seen the second largest stock market appreciation since WWII. During that past 112 months, the S&P500 has appreciated 302%, equivalent to an annualized rate of 16.7% every year since 2009. If it can survive just two more months, the current economic expansion will be the longest in American history.

Rank	Bull Market	Dates	Months	S&P 500 Return	Annualized Return
1	Great Expansion	’90-’00	114	418%	19.00%
2	Post-Crisis Bull Run	’09-’18*	112*	302%	16.70%
3	Post-War Boom	’49-’56	86	267%	20.00%
4	That ’70s Growth	’74-’80	74	126%	14.10%
5	Reagan Era	’82-’87	60	229%	26.70%
6	The Hot Aughts	’02-’07	60	101%	15.00%

For now the longest expansion in American history was the great expansion of the ‘roaring’ 90s. That expansion occurred against a backdrop of rising wages, falling oil prices, falling federal budget deficits, increasing productivity, and high rates of economic growth. The current expansion, while long, has seen weak wage growth, higher oil prices (for the majority of the expansion), massive increases in federal deficits, and below average economic growth and productivity growth. Nonetheless, it has endured as a result of the Federal Reserve and other central banks maintaining record low interest rates and printing trillions of dollars of money to monetize the largest increase in global debt in world history. While that recipe has kept the US out of recession and kept financial asset prices rising, it has created massive systemic risk, propped up unsustainable businesses addicted to cheap credit, and exacerbated the wealth divide. It has also papered over the need to address structural economic reforms. Because central banks have yet to fully normalize monetary policy and because governments are far more indebted now than at the start of the economic expansion, neither is properly positioned to constructively respond to the eventual end of the current bull market.

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