The tobacco plant, Nicotiana tabacum. Public-domain photograph.
In the mid-1990s a long expansion, falling unemployment, and a roaring stock market started to feel like a new normal.
If money is tight, a boom you only read about is a boom that has not reached your wage.
If you are in the middle, a rising retirement account can make a modest salary feel like a plan.
If you have savings, the danger is believing the price is the same thing as the profit.
Unemployment fell and share prices climbed through the second half of the 1990s.
In December 1996 Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan asked whether markets were in the grip of irrational exuberance.
The phrase was early, and the boom kept going.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1990s expansion; Alan Greenspan, December 5, 1996.