Decline and fall, part 2

 Now I will look at confidence in economic institutions:

A decline until the 1990s, then an increase until around 2000, a decline until about 2010, and maybe some increase since then.  

For banks, a similar pattern, but with bigger swings.

For organized labor, the same general pattern, but it seems like a bigger rise in the last decade or so.

Gallup has regularly asked about small business only since the 1990s, but there was a question on "small companies" in 1975.  That showed 57% with "a great deal" or "quite a bit" of confidence, about the same level as in the 1990s.  There's appears to be a pretty steady increase since the 1990s, but there was a gap between 1998 and 2007, which is roughly the period when confidence in other economic institutions declined.  But overall, there's an upward rather than a downward trend.  There was a big jump from 2019 to 2020, which may be because people felt sympathetic to small businesses during the pandemic.