What if one of the most telling confirmations of the long-term trend in stocks is NOT in that soup of economic statistics like GDP, PPI, CPI and ISM...
...But instead is as close as your television screen?
The July 2011 Socionomist does indeed explain how popular TV shows reflect the trend in social mood, and how that same mood is at work in the financial markets. Specifically, the current line-up of hit shows now delivers some of the most violent and graphic programs in television history. The message from this indicator is coming in loud and clear:
...it's important to note that there are qualitative differences between a bull market and a bear market rally. The social expressions of the latter are noticeably darker. The recovery rally from October 1966-November 1968 is a good example: When social mood [entered] a major bear trend in 1966, so did ground-breaking horror movies. Night of the Living Dead debuted in 1968, the year after the last of that era's Disney cartoon classics. It was so influential that it spawned two sequels (both produced during the bear market), several derivations and two books.
In turn, The Socionomist relates the powerful parallel between the 1968 bear market rally expressed by Living Dead, and the 2009-2011 rally expressed by HBO's Game of Thrones (from George RR Martin's novels of the same name):
Martin's epic... is a decidedly bear market work.... It portrays a chaotic and unpredictable political struggle peopled with complex characters whose morals come in all shades of gray. It visits and revisits the grisly details of such themes as betrayal, immolation, hanging, beheading, amputation, poisoning, cannibalism, incest, disinherited bastard children, deformities and prostitution to name just a few. Thrones garnered widespread acclaim during a Primary degree advance in the stock market. But critically, the advance has been a bear market rally that has occurred eleven years into a historic Supercycle-degree bear market.
The television adaptation of Martin's medieval epic is one of several shows in a growing trend of "dark, mixed morality success stories." Does this represent a low in social mood, or merely the start of negative long-term themes not just in art and cinema, but also in stocks and the economy?
Tune into the groundbreaking insights of the current Socionomist and discover how some of the most revealing expressions of the larger trend in stocks and the economy are on the stage of pop culture. Follow the fast and easy steps here.