Today, I’m providing you with a potpourri of thoughts/quotes about our great country that we thought might be helpful.

• Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Matthew Hennessey offers a big picture perspective: The U.S. boasts an innovative and resilient economy that is the envy of the world. We live longer and better than our grandparents did. Our universities and companies are magnets for global talent. We invented the telephone, the airplane, and the internet. We’ve given the world jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and hip-hop. We have Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Wall Street is still the top dog. The dollar is the world’s currency, and the U.S. Treasury is the world’s safest investment. The United States is still the last best hope on earth.

• Our mantra at VVP has always been that markets go up over time because innovation and technology thrust us forward…and that equities are the only asset that fully capture human ingenuity. This is borne out by some statistics we have used before in this space. If you had invested $10,000 into the S&P 500 in January of 1972, you would have $1.9 million today (assuming taxes were paid through another source and dividends were reinvested). This despite the fact that the market dropped by 50% three times (1973-74…Watergate, oil crises, 2000-02….dot-com bubble, 9/11, and 2007-08, the Great Recession and mortgage crisis).

• Way back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote “Democracy in America,” stating, “Every presidential election is a kind of national crisis that drives people crazy, but that madness dissipates when the election ends.”

• Both John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan invoked a phrase used by John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, who referred to America as the shining city on the hill!”

We believe that’s true…stay optimistic!

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