Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
At some point, probably sooner than most people think, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is going to hit 100,000. And when it does, you can already picture the scene. It’ll be like every major milestone the Dow has ever hit so far combined.
CNBC will run a countdown. There will be breathless retrospectives about how far the market has come. Somebody will dig up footage from the New York Stock Exchange. And, almost certainly, we will print a stupid hat that says “DOW 100,000”.
Wall Street has been doing this for decades. One of the great traditions of the old NYSE floor was celebrating big round Dow numbers as though humanity had just split the atom for the first time. When the Dow first crossed 10,000 in March 1999, traders cheered, confetti flew and “Dow 10,000” baseball caps were tossed onto the floor.
And back then, maybe the hats actually made sense. The enormous advance in American equities over the preceding generations represented, to a meaningful degree, an extraordinary expansion in American productive capacity, corporate earnings, technological progress and real wealth creation. The country built things, invented things, became more productive and produced companies that generated vastly more earnings than their predecessors. Obviously monetary inflation existed then too, but there was something tangible underneath the milestone worth celebrating.
The hats became part of Wall Street folklore, particularly through Art Cashin, the legendary floor trader who bought his NYSE seat in 1964 and spent six decades becoming one of the most recognizable
