OT: General Market Commentary from BW
<<Stock Losses in Oughts as Bad as in 1930s Depression
Posted by: David Henry on June 22
There are still six months left in this decade, but it is not too soon to start drafting its obituary. Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at Standard & Poor’s, is already looking at the decade’s stock market legacy. It’s ugly. The S&P 500 is down 39.22% from Dec. 31, 1999 through Monday’s close.
“We need a 63.79% advance just to break-even for the decade,” Silverblatt says. That’s not going to happen by Dec. 31. “The last negative decade was the 1930s, -41.77%,” according to Silverblatt. Annualized, stocks lost 5.12% so far this decade; in the 1930s decade of the Great Depression they lost 5.26%.
When this decade started, the talk was about sure-thing tech stocks and worries that the Y2K software bug would set the world back to 1900. The computer clocks entered the new millennium. The tech stocks broke down within 90 days.
Some people said we should call this decade the oughts, for the two zeroes. The term didn’t catch on. Looking back, it is clear that the real oughts of the 2000s were that we ought not to have paid so much for internet stocks and that we ought not to have paid so much for big houses with granite counter-tops.
Now we know that it was a lot easier, and cheaper, to fix the Y2K bug before a calamity than to fix the stock, housing and credit markets after. To our regret, we were more skeptical of computer programs than the “efficient” markets we wanted to make us rich. Nerds win. Pigs lose.>>
ref: businessweek.com
Woody |
