One of my favorite new web toys to play around with is the cover search feature in the Time Magazine archives. The folks at that magazine have put every Time cover since its inception in 1923 in a searchable format on their web site. No doubt it must have been an epic slave labor project for some poor group of interns, but, hey – that’s what interns are for.

Anyway, the reason I am so intrigued with this feature is that you can search covers by hundreds of different categories and themes that Time has assigned to their thousands of covers. You may be interested to know, for instance, that Darth Vader has been on more covers (4) than Mother Theresa (2).  It is also interesting to note that “Family Values” has garnered only one cover in Time’s history, but “Sex” has garnered 22 covers.  (I guess this explains why Hugh Heffner lives in a mansion.)

While you can certainly idle away some time fooling around this site, it does offer a practical application for my work as an investment advisor, because it provides some great perspective about how the media makes us believe that every point of time we are in is uniquely dire, yet in the big picture we somehow seem to keep muddling along.

For instance, this cover in 1979 would have had us believe that we were on the verge of a new Ice Age:

Global Cooling

So to look at this cover from 2001 you would wonder how we went from Ice Box to Frying Pan so quickly:

Global Warming

And whatever happened to the hole in the Ozone layer (see 1992 cover below)? Did that fix itself, or did the media just get bored with it? Or did our sunscreen get better?

Ozone

While some stories change, though, many of the media’s obsessions seem to repeat themselves in familiar patterns. Consider these covers from 2008 (left) and 1992 (right):

New Hard Times     How Bad Is It

You’d never have guessed the stock market more than tripled during that span of time (even after the ’08 crash), would you?

And if you think that’s Déjà vu all over again, consider these four covers from (left to right) 1984, 1974, 1972 and 1970:

That Monster Deficit     Trying to fight back

Is the US going broke     Crying Dollar1

The point to all this is not to assert that we don’t have real problems to contend with. It’s that contending with problems is a never-ending process in life. But the media can’t sell that premise; they need you to buy magazines and watch TV shows, so every single thing has to be presented as uniquely dire.

So don’t let the mass media fear machine guide your investment decisions, because, after sifting through nearly a century of Time covers, I can assure you that you will never find a comfortable time to be in the market.