USA at 250 Through a Wall Street Lens: Where we’ve been and what comes next.

Our 25-year “Big USA birthday” check-in cycle will show that round national US birthdays have come at very random times for the US stock market over the years, with a couple of notable exceptions. Will 2026 prove a pivotal moment or near-miss for future market history or are we just getting started in this AI revolution and the stock market implications of it? Read on in our 2026 section below and our stab at what awaits for 2051, with far more questions than answers there.

Graphic: The Four Great Bulls: 125 years of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Yes, we all know that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a flawed index, with its mere 30 stocks and its price-weighted rather than market-cap-weighted calculation methodology. But for the 125-year sweep of our survey, it is the indispensable old yardstick. Note that the y-axis is logarithmic and that returns are of course not inflation-adjusted and do not include the tremendous returns from dividends (far greater in the past – more perspective on historic returns below). There have been four great bull markets since 1901 and the iconic 1920s market was the weakest of the four, though the total returns over 25-year time frames including dividends above show how impactful dividends were historically. Now, many companies prefer more tax-efficient buybacks, which put more of the return in the price of the stock rather than in its yield. 

1901: USA turns 125

1901: The first billion-dollar corporation, U.S. Steel.
The US equity market traces as far back as the 1790s, with the first traded equities in banking and insurance. Later, the early 19^th century also saw extensive capital formation linked to canal building, though mostly publicly financed. It was in the latter half of the 19^th century, however, that equity markets were supersized by the need to raise capital for railroads, transforming especially Wall Street, but also the US economy as a major driver of industrialization. Railroads were the future, everyone could see that and they got built and changed the world, fueling both an epic boom and then horrific bust in the 1870s, with another bust to come in the 1930s. The year 1901 itself saw the creation of U.S. Steel by J.P. Morgan from Carnegie Steel and other smaller steel companies. It was a new national champion, capitalized with equity and debt worth some USD 1.4 billion, far and away a record for the time. Most of the large US stocks of the time, besides banks and insurance companies, were major heavy industrial companies like railroads, mining and trust companies (in products like rubber, sugar, and believe it or not, lead and leather.)

Graphic: a 1901 EV at your service.
1901 was famous for the listing of U.S. Steel organized by J.P. Morgan. But who remembers one of the speculative favorites of 1900-01, the Electric Vehicle Company, which was NYSE listed from 1899-1907? The picture below is of one of their products, the Hansom battery-powered “EV” from the time. The company tried to monopolize the New York City cab market with battery-powered EVs featuring “quick swap” batteries. There was a brief burst of speculation in the stock in this time frame before the company failed as it wasn’t so quick to swap the car’s massive batteries, which also tended to die in the cold of winter. Many don’t realize that the superiority of electricity in terms of power efficiency to the wheels was known early on. The problem was the lack of portability and durability of the batteries: battery tech was primitive and extremely heavy. More than another century would pass before Elon Musk and Tesla began realizing the potential of EVs using lithium-ion batteries.  Image credit: from Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license.

1926: the USA turns 150

US stock market: Still financials and industrials dominate, but consumer products begin making a splash. Market is about halfway from 1920 lows to the eventual 1929 bubble top.
1926 was a year of pausing within the “roaring 1920s”, which saw the US emerging from a brief brutal post-WWI recession in 1920-21 to see a surge in growth, led by mass production, electrification, urbanization, construction and the booming automobile industry as well as the rise of consumer finance for autos and housing. General Motors was the dominant automotive stock and rose more than ten-fold from 1921 until its peak in 1929. Bank stocks boomed massively, as much as 600% off the lows to the 1929 highs. Outside of industrial and automotive tech, RCA was one of the first true tech stocks with its radio communications patents and a bevy of consumer devices for broadcast, phonograph and later even sound for film. By many estimates, it was a true 100-bagger within the decade (trading one hundred times its lowest value of the decade at its peak). In early 1926, the year of the US’ 150^th birthday, it traded in the 40’s before rising to a split-adjusted 568 at its peak before the 1929 crash.

Graphic: A 1929 Cadillac
The 1920s were the first real decade of the automobile, with the US out-producing the world many times over in cars in this decade and through the 1950s. GM was a superstar growth stock of the decade, one of the most actively traded stocks during the final years of the bull run into the 1929 top. The Cadillac brand was at the highest end of General Motors’ stable of brands for different demographics. A gorgeous car to be sure, if not quite a Duesy. This very car was apparently specifically intended for use by the US ambassador to Argentina. Picture: This is a public domain image from Wikipedia.

1951: The USA turns 175

US stock market: The early bull years that would extend until the mid-1960s. Among large stocks, the first computing superstar rose in an economy dominated by industry and autos.
The early 1950s saw the true start of a great bull market emerging from the post-War inflation adjustment as pent-up savings from the war were put to work, even with reduced buying power. That bull would extend all the way until the mid-1960s, though the Dow Jones Industrial Average would not achieve its 1929 peak until 1954. The US auto sector was titanic in the 1950s, with the US producing over 80% of all cars in the world as American soldiers returned home from the war effort and started families with government-subsidized cheap housing and auto finance, while the US government launched its vast interstate highway building project. At the auto industry’s height in the decade, about one in six US working Americans was either employed by a car company or by one of the many companies feeding the vast automotive pipeline. But while GM stock had a great decade (Ford wouldn’t list until 1956, Chrysler was a relative stock market dud), rising some 300% dividend-adjusted in the decade, other industries and companies drove spectacular returns. IBM and its industry-standard mainframe computers saw a return of over 700% in the decade, as the first computing superstar spread its wings.

Graphic: The great US equity market of the 1950s, as brought to life in the industrial art of 195’s automobiles.
Arguably, every decade since the 1920s has been the decade of the automobile in the USA, which dominated global automobile production and consumption in the 20^th century. But the 1950s was the apogee of the American car as industrial art and consumer good, with constantly updating aesthetics to signal to your neighbors which brand you drove and whether it was the latest model. Car production was also the single largest sector of the US productive economy. General Motors dominated, though it was already so large that it merely posted a great decade for shareholders, not an exceptional one. The car below was a concept car called the Buick LeSabre from the year 1951, when the USA celebrated its 175^th birthday. The car anticipated the car-as-industrial-art trend that intensified as the decade wore on. Image credit: from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons license.

1976: The USA turns 200

US stock market: Emerging from the wreckage of the worst post-WWII bear market and post-Nifty Fifty bust, but still a long wait ahead for the next sustained bull market.
The mid-1960s until all the way into the early 1980s saw the longest stretch of weak inflation-adjusted returns for US equity market investors since the Great Depression era. The 1965-1972 US spending on the Vietnam War and new Great Society welfare programs drove an inflationary impulse in the late 1960s and early 1970s that was then super-sized by the Arab Oil Embargo starting in late 1973, which saw the price of oil quadrupling. Add in the political scandal of Watergate and President Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and the sense of a nation losing its way was complete. In the stock market of the early 1970s, the “Nifty Fifty” of large, blue-chip companies were all the rage as the market celebrated profitable large pure-play companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, rejecting the late 1960s rage for sprawling conglomerates. Alas, nosebleed valuations set up the crash into the post-oil embargo and Watergate-inspired epic lows of late 1974. And yet, on the nation’s birthday in 1976, though the market was up some 70% or more from that 1974 nadir, it would continue to stumble sideways all the way until the great bull market that kicked off in 1982.

Graphic: A 1970s Ford Pinto. By 1976, US automobiles had become worse than sad, both in terms of reliability and design.
The 1970s were a sad decade for the US, as corporate mismanagement caused terrible product reliability problems. In 1973, the perfect storm for huge US gas-guzzling cars arrived in the form of skyrocketing fuel prices from the Arab Oil Embargo and rising imports of fuel-sipping and reliable Japanese cars. Perhaps no American car of the age was reviled more for its aesthetics and even basic safety than the Ford Pinto, here shown in all its late 1970s “glory”. I was alive to witness this first-hand in my early childhood and I’ll never forget my father’s cursing out our early 1970s Ford LTD (an eight-cylinder behemoth) which always seemed to be in the shop with electrical problems. It disappeared after a few troubled years. We also had a 1969 Dodge Dart that rusted aggressively and had upholstery in the back seat that had more or less exploded from the Texas heat by the time I became aware of its existence in my early childhood. Not long after it dropped its muffler while my mother drove it one day in 1977, it also quickly disappeared from our driveway. An eight-year-old car sent to the scrap heap – not something you see in 2026, when cars are living twice that long on average. Image credit: from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons license.

2001: The USA turns 225

US stock market: The US equity market was stumbling, with formerly popular tech stocks already in a dire bear market, down more than 50% from their bubble highs and set to sour a generation of retail investors on equity investing. A sustained return to new market highs wouldn’t come until 2013.
The late 1990s and into the year 2000 brought, of course, a spectacular tech and telecom bubble. Its key drivers were the enormous capital spending (sound familiar) to deploy the physical structure of the internet, including the cables, the networking equipment, and the computers themselves as businesses invested in transforming their operations for this new era. The novelty and implications of the new technology caught the popular imagination, a critical element for all bubbles. Endless IPOs like Pets.com (268 days from IPO to liquidation) and eToys.com (sub-2 years from IPO to folding) fed the wild popular speculative hunger. Round-the-clock financial TV channels and outfits like The Beardstown Ladies did likewise, with constant hype and stock-picking tips. The era was rapidly ending in 2001, including for the aforementioned ladies, who were later sued in lawsuits for fudging their performance calculations. US Congress moved with predictable maximum hindsight, drumming up the burdensome Sarbanes-Oxley (SarBox or SOX) legislation on financial reporting and other requirements that contributed to the end of the small company IPO pipeline.

Specifically for the window of the USA’s big 225^th birthday in 2001, it is worth noting that high-quality stocks of almost all non-tech kinds had practically been thrown out the window in 1999 and 2000, and value stocks in particular actually enjoyed a very strong year in 2001 as the market rotated out of tech. For the visionaries, some incredible bargains were to be found in the wreckage. Amazon.com’s late 1999 high was 107 per share and its late 2001 low was 5.5 per share, a nearly 95% drop. It then went on to rise to over 5,000+ per share earlier this year (not adjusted for the 2022 stock split), not missing the 1,000-bagger status by much. On the other hand, Cisco Systems, the great networking equipment maker and ultimate tech growth stock of the 1990s, only retook its former all-time high from the year 2000 earlier this year.

Chart: General Electric (GE) 1976-2026. The house that Jack built while also undermining its foundation, before it was later rebuilt again from the original.
A rare company that has been a constant amidst the often-shifting backdrop of large US companies of the historical record since 1901 is General Electric. While GE survived in name, it’s not quite the old GE, as GE Vernova (the original parent’s energy business) and GE Healthcare were spun off in recent years. The GE ticker itself survives for GE Aerospace, the largest original chunk. The original GE stock peaked out as the largest US company by market cap in the 2000-01 time frame around the time of the US’ 225^th birthday, driven by CEO Jack Welch’s focus on financialization of its business model. That model aged horribly during the Global Financial Crisis, when the company’s shares cratered some 90% from their high-water mark of 2000. The last 25 years have shown that “The house that Jack built” was also “The house that saw Jack eroding the foundation”. But now, over just the last few years, its two largest spinoff companies based on its old industrial base have been lit on fire by growth and hype: for GE Aerospace (the dominant original portion that retained the legendary ticker shown here) it’s the space, jet engine and defense business and for GE Vernova, it’s the AI boom and demand for natural gas turbines to generate electricity for data centers. GE Vernova’s  gas turbine capacity is mostly booked through 2030. Image source: Bloomberg.

2026: USA turns 250

US stock market: Amazingly, atop another bull market, first largely built on the Mag7 stocks, but later on the AI buildout. The S&P 500 had already posted an advance of over 1000%, not dividend- or inflation-adjusted, from the 2009 lows.
Well, we all know where we are now, right? The second great bull market after the malaise of the 1960s to early 1980s and the third great bull market since World War II kicked off mid-GFC in early 2009. Most of its early phase was powered by a revaluation from very “cheap” levels, but the big extension was built on the spectacular profits of the largest US tech companies and their monopoly platforms – especially Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Tesla and Nvidia were relative latecomers that quickly made up for lost time as Nvidia went on to become the largest company in the world.

Riding high on the slope of this vertigo-inducing advance in the US market, everyone’s question now is how much longer the bull can extend – especially when the sober traditional models of long-term valuations suggest that expected returns should be negative for the next decade or more. In mid-2026 at the nation’s 250^th birthday, US and global investors are torn between joining the speculative frenzy and asking themselves whether the titanic AI investment boom has already overextended.

Most of the upside in the very last phase of this great market boom since early 2025 has been concentrated in the “pick and shovels” plays of the AI buildout, in everything from the number-crunching semiconductor chips and hardware in the data centers to the trades and construction expertise to build and the power equipment to provide the electricity for data centers. The first half of 2026 alone saw a more than 100% year-to-date (through the June 29 cut-off for this article) advance in more than half of the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) of 30 chip names.

Twenty-five years before, fully three of the Mag7 weren’t even listed at our prior check-in 2001: Tesla, Google (later Alphabet) and Meta. In fact, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school and years from creating “The Facebook” at Harvard. Nvidia was a successful graphics card company in 2001, still up smartly from its 1999 IPO price. For the 25 years from July 2001 to the 2026 peak, the share price rose about 750 times, or 75,000%.

Graphic: Can we even imagine the future of mobility from our 2026 vantage point?
The car pictured below is from Zoox, the autonomous vehicle startup acquired by Amazon.com, which looks like a kind of car/minivan cross and imagined from the ground up as a driverless vehicle that can move in either direction at full speed. Autonomous vehicles sit at the center of our AI-driven future, and I don’t think we have properly anticipated how much autonomous driving will transform our cities. The Zoox is interesting, but can we even imagine what the cars themselves and car infrastructure might look like 20 or more years from now? My favorite objection to the current monster heavy, giga-battery EVs is this: it’s not so much that we will have new battery tech that can extend ranges (we’ll inevitably get that, too), it’s that once everything is automated and there are no accidents, more or all safety features can be stripped away and the “cars” can be made incredibly svelte and light. Or will they even be cars, or will “pods” with teensy batteries dominate, ones that only need a few kilometers of range because they can be hooked up directly to the mains, possibly in a chain to a master “conductor pod” that is wired straight to a rail in the street surface – all navigation controlled by AI algorithms and decoupling and recoupling to new conductor pods? If so, our cities will need massive refitting as the per car/pod utilization rockets and the need for parking spots and error margins on roadways fall by 70% or more. Regardless, we’ll probably look back with humor at our vision of the EV future from the perspective of the year 2051. Image credit: from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons license.

2051: USA turns 275

US stock market: What will the next 25 years hold for our portfolios?
Expected real returns from the July 2026 starting point of our prior check-in were at the lowest ever for any modern 25-year prior check-in period in our history – as noted above at negative levels for the next decade or more. Will this sober math limit the market’s potential? Or are we in a new era unconstrained by traditional considerations as AI is set to power a productivity revolution that will enhance the profitability of deployed capital to a degree unseen since the early days of the Industrial Revolution? Assuming the latter, can our societies hold together as we witness wholesale replacement of increasingly skilled white-collar work? And if that is the risk, will governments step in with a heavy hand to tax capital to redistribute it to the masses in a kind of universal basic income (UBI)? Alternatively, is the steep cost to build and run all that AI hardware meant to replace human labor, especially networked labor at the medium and large-company scale, more expensive than human labor itself at that scale? Maybe we’re not so inefficient after all.

Assuming AI is here to stay and its impact will extend, should we see the coming AI revolution in a far more positive light? The optimistic take could look something like: the brave new world of AI will liberate office drones and service workers at many levels from mind-numbing and repetitive tasks, leading to whole new job categories that we can’t even begin to describe. And its productivity will enhance comfort and living standards for everyone. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll all sit around noodling on the piano or painting watercolors full time, or more dystopically, sit around WALL-E-style slobbering before bespoke AI-powered entertainment uniquely tuned to maximize our engagement via a steady stream of dopamine hits.

Speaking of addictive entertainment, ahem Reels and TikTok anno 2026, there is one recent story from Starbucks that gives me hope about one secret sauce that AI will never replace. I think it speaks volumes about one possible direction for a huge sector of our economy: the community economy. Back in 2025, Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol pulled the plug on and reversed the massive automation effort the company had launched to either make human tasks in its cafés redundant or to speed them up. The effect of the automation drive? It was counterproductive for Starbucks’ bottom line as customer traffic dropped off. It turns out, café baristas are a part of a café’s ambience and the sense of place and community that going to a Starbucks delivers. Starbucks was destroying its own product, which was service, community and the customer experience, not just the fancy beverages. With fewer and busier baristas without the bandwidth for human warmth, there was less “there there”.

So sure, let’s replace 80% of the screen-based drudgery in our economies and replace it with something more community-based and purposeful. I don’t know what that looks like outside of our little Starbucks example, but it sounds great in theory.

What will all this mean for the US stock market? I suspect the AI revolution will disrupt nearly everything, especially the platform monopolies of the Mag7. On the hardware and chips side of tech, even if “compute” remains a critical input, many incumbent tech names may eventually be displaced by companies with better architectures, better models or better distribution. And eventually, if AI can only automate and can’t innovate beyond human levels, i.e., no real “AI superintelligence”, hardware may prove less of a bottleneck. Elsewhere: data centers in space? Give me a break, or at least, color me extremely skeptical.

Beyond the great AI and tech race, the next twenty-five years may be dominated by two struggles. First is the mounting fight to get ahead of risks from climate change, whatever that looks like, as CO2 emissions must achieve net zero. Whether it’s through alternatives, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion or carbon sequestration or some combination of the above, it doesn’t matter, it must and will happen. There are some equity market plays in there somewhere. The second struggle will be to get ahead of the steepening decline in global fertility rates. What on earth – literally – are humanity and our societies, economies and equities for if we stop reproducing? Longevity and financial support for family building will be a growing priority, and maybe a newfound recognition of the importance of connection and that potential for prioritizing community building over office minion jobs will help on that front. We can only hope so.