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Page 27
Neal: The euphoria is like "happy days are here again." This is incredible, this is the biggest bull market in history. We are getting to a point in America that people don't have to work. They can just let the money work for them.
Nina: Yeah.
Neal: There are businesses that don't get the kind of return that the stock market is giving people.
Nina: Yeah, that's true.
Neal: Recently, I completed some seminars for a Florida software company. People are quitting work and letting the market work for them.
Nina: It sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? Likely, though, it's not a sustainable situation. That's the key. This bull market, this blow-off top we've seen over the last couple of years, is the last of a series of very long-term cycles. They are of varying lengths but are all finishing at roughly the same time. One very long cycle has been in progress since the 1800s. Now your average investor would have a hard time contemplating such a concept because memory is limited to what we know directly, and for many people, that's maybe 20 or so years. Even if you can incorporate what your parents might have told you about what it was like to live through the 1930s, it's not very immediate, and it doesn't strike any kind of emotional response with you. So trying to imagine something that began more than 100 years ago, 120 years ago, or 170 years ago is impossible.
Neal: Around the time Andrew Jackson was President.
Nina: That's right. The very long-term cycle that's ending is of that magnitude. The others are of shorter durations but are still

 
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