Ever since the U.S. financial crisis in 2008 there have been many comparisons to Japan and their “lost decade.” Most comparisons mark the start of each financial crisis as the end of 1989 for Japan and 2007 for the U.S. We believe each deserves some clarification: Not only does the lost decade need to be pluralized, but the U.S. financial crisis is more appropriately dated to 2000, when we entered our secular deflationary bear market in the wake of the bursting of the dot-com bubble.