The most important economic trend of the last 40 years is about to reverse

The relevance of the time value of money – that today's money is worth more than tomorrow's money – has diminished in recent decades. But it's about to reassert itself with a bang. John Stepek explains why, and what it means for you.

Fistful of tenners
The valuation spread between “today" and “tomorrow" could start to widen again
(Image credit: © Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)

“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”, or so the old saying goes. But is it always the case? What if the bird in your hand is a manky old London pigeon, and the two in the bush are fat juicy organic hand-reared turkeys, and Christmas is just around the corner? You sure you wouldn’t be better off taking a crack at the two in the bush instead?

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.