The Bureau of Historic Losses · The Skeptics' Ledger
Entry № 010
BusinessWeek
Cover story, 13 August 1979
“The Death of Equities”
$1,000 of Bitcoin the day they said it, at its peak
US$70,841
its high so far — 70.8×, reached June 2026
Worth today
US$69,18169.2×
live valuation · refreshed hourly · usd
As of 18 June 2026, $1,000 of Bitcoin bought when BusinessWeek said it (US$107 a coin) is worth US$69,181 today, and peaked at US$70,841 — 70.8× — in June 2026.
On the record
On 13 August 1979, BusinessWeek's cover story 'The Death of Equities' argued that inflation had permanently broken the stock market and that a generation had given up on shares for good. It is now the most famous magazine cover in financial history — because it ran almost exactly at the start of an 18-year bull market. The figure above tracks the index since.
It is the single most famous magazine cover in the history of money, and it is famous for being wrong. In the summer of 1979, with inflation gnawing through the American economy and the stock market having gone roughly nowhere for over a decade, BusinessWeek put the case for despair on its front page: “The Death of Equities.” The argument was that inflation had permanently changed the game, that a new generation of investors had abandoned shares for real assets and money-market funds, and that they were never coming back.
The reasoning was not stupid. It was a faithful description of the previous decade, written by people extrapolating a miserable present into an endless future — which is what bearish covers always are, and why they so reliably mark bottoms. The market does not ring a bell at the turn; it prints a magazine cover declaring the patient dead.
The bull market that began in 1982 — and ran, with interruptions, for the better part of two decades — is the one the cover swore would never come. The figure above is what a thousand dollars left in the index around the time of its obituary would have become. The equities, it turns out, declined to die.
Where they stand now
The cover became a cautionary classic; BusinessWeek itself later revisited it repeatedly as the textbook example of a contrarian buy signal, and “death of equities” entered the language as shorthand for peak pessimism. No reversal was ever needed — the market wrote the rebuttal in full.
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