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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

> After a crash, the stock market tends to recover in a couple of quarters (think three to six).

Based on recent crashes yes, but has that always been true?

No, the Great Depression lasted 10 years, from 1929 to 1939 officially (and, for instance, the djia took until the 1950s to recover to the bull market levels that preceded the Great Depression).

Or the japanese crash of the early 90s, from which japan still hasn't recovered.

The nikkei is about 1/3 of what it used to be almost 30 years on.

All crashes are recent, the stock market isn't that old.

Unless you mean a specific market, it's older than pretty much any state in existence. Medieval European cities had stock markets.

And that's assuming something like ancient Greece, didn't have a stock market, because that's possible, and if true it's older than every religion in existence today.

And keep in mind that ancient Greece had an interstate cheque clearing system, shared ownership of companies, inheritance laws for dealing with such things, ... you know the sort of thing you'd expect a state to have in order to support a stock market.

Lastly, we have no real idea what financial infrastructure ancient Egypt had, except of course, we do know it allowed for "international" (between partners under different governments) trade with both trading partners ~800km apart, while hiring intermediaries for passing along the goods. We just have no idea how it worked. If it happened to have a stock market, that makes the stock market roughly the age of stonehenge.

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