Nearly seventy years ago Harold Macmillan stood on Bedford Town's football ground and told the country that most of our people had never had it so good.
By my reckoning, most Town Close portfolios are as high as they have ever been. There is more money for the things that matter most to you. Within reason. And on top of that, it's the best summer I can remember in years.
So why doesn't it feel that way?
In a word, leadership. Can we point to any leader, anywhere, and say there's our guiding light? I struggle. We've had seven Prime Ministers in ten years. That's a new one roughly every seventeen months, which I gather is about the shelf life of a Premier League manager. Look around the other capitals and it isn't much cheerier. Governance and vision are thin on the ground.
And yet markets, and your investments, continue to do well.
And that tells you something. Despite the paucity at the top, people keep getting up in the morning and going to work. They put their best foot forward for themselves and their families. They make goods and provide services the rest of us want and value. The companies they work for make profits, which governments tax, and the value of those companies creeps higher, in the round.
That is what shows up in your valuation. Millions of people doing their jobs properly, all over the world, whoever happens to be in charge.
Macmillan asked, in the same speech, whether it was all too good to last. Seventy years of leaders coming and going since then suggests the prosperity was never really theirs to keep or to lose.
If only they took their cues from the rest of us.