Oren Cass's Bad Timing

The Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed 50,000 for the first time on February 6, 2026 — fittingly on the 115th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth. When Reagan took office, the Dow was basically dead. The index stood at 950, down 20 points from its 1965 level. 

Taking the 70s-era “Great Inflation” into account, the Dow had shed around two-thirds of its value over the decade or so before Reagan’s inauguration. Capturing the dismal mood of many marketwatchers, BusinessWeek proclaimed “The Death of Equities” in a famous August 1979 cover story that lamented the stock market’s “near‑permanent condition” of decline, “reversible some day, but not soon.” 

Reagan, of course, changed all that. Under his pro-market policies, the U.S. economy — and U.S. equities — roared back to life. The Dow more than doubled, launching a bull run that would stretch for decades and culminate in a milestone once unimaginable: 50,000.

The market’s decades-long rise hasn’t yet registered with the New York Times's editors. Rather than celebrate Dow 50k, the paper ran a long essay on the weekend following the historic day by American Compass economist Oren Cass, headlined “The Finance Industry is a Grift. Let’s Start Treating It That Way.”