How three tonnes of bronze got from a SoHo studio to the entrance of the New York Stock Exchange in the back of a flatbed truck — and from there, two blocks south, to a slab of Manhattan it has never left since.
A bronze statue can hold a pose forever. Markets cannot. They move in two distinct moods — named, since the 18th century, after the two ways an animal attacks.
A bull market is when prices climb — broadly, persistently, for months or years at a stretch. A bear market is when they fall by 20% or more from a recent peak and stay there. The names come from how each animal strikes: a bull tosses its horns upward; a bear swipes its paw down. Eighteenth-century London coffee-houses borrowed the image, and the labels stuck.
The difference isn't only direction. A bull market runs on confidence — easy credit, rising earnings, the comfortable belief that next quarter will look like this one, only larger. A bear market runs on the opposite: a sudden, contagious doubt that yesterday's prices were ever real. Bulls climb a staircase; bears fall down an elevator shaft. Since World War II, the average S&P 500 bull has lasted about five years and gained ~180%; the average bear has lasted about 13 months and lost ~35%. Both sides of that asymmetry are what every long-term chart is really drawing.
The panel below puts them on one axis. Watch how the line spends most of its time grinding upward — and how the red wells, the bears, arrive fast, deep, and unmistakable.
Every bear has a story, and the stories are not interchangeable. A credit crisis begins inside the plumbing of the financial system itself — banks holding loans that won't repay, balance sheets that look fine until a question is asked too loudly. 2008 is the canonical version: a US mortgage market backed by securities nobody could price, then a global panic when nobody trusted anybody's books. Credit crises are slow to build and brutal to unwind; the damage reaches the real economy through frozen lending, not falling prices.
A bubble crisis is the opposite: a single story — railways, radios, dot-coms, crypto — convinces a generation of investors that the old rules of valuation no longer apply. Prices detach from earnings, then from common sense, then from each other. The 2000 dot-com bust wiped out roughly $5 trillion in market value not because the companies vanished, but because the prices had been pretending to be something they weren't. Bubbles end on their own, usually with no single trigger anyone can name afterwards.
An exogenous shock comes from outside the market entirely. Black Monday 1987 — the event that haunted Di Modica into his midnight installation — was a textbook one: program-trading feedback loops on a Monday morning, no recession in sight, the Dow down 22.6% by closing bell. COVID in 2020 was another: a 34% peak-to-trough drop in 33 days, the fastest bear in history, ended by a fiscal-policy response just as fast. Exogenous shocks land hard but rarely break the underlying machinery; markets recover when the shock passes.
What separates them, in the end, is what gets broken. Bubbles break a story. Shocks break a mood. Credit crises break the plumbing. The first two heal in months. The third can take a decade. And while every commentator on every front page swears this one is different, the empirical record is unhelpfully consistent: the same three shapes, in different costumes.
"Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria." — John Templeton
Today the air is thick with talk of an AI bubble — the most concentrated capex boom in a generation, valuations on a small handful of chipmakers and platform companies doing most of the index's heavy lifting. Maybe it ends like 2000. Maybe it doesn't. The bronze on Bowling Green doesn't have an opinion on that — it just keeps its head down and leans forward, the way Di Modica cast it, as a working argument that the next chapter is still up.
Downturns are temporary.
Stubbornness is not.
A long-form scroll-piece · gs_splash · charging_bull · finance_charts
Bowling Green, New York · bronze, 3,200 kg, since 15 December 1989