How BAD was the last decade for the market????????????????
Adjusted for Inflation, Dow's Gains Are Puny
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ABREAST OF THE MARKET
DECEMBER 28, 2009
By E.S. BROWNING
"...In 1999 dollars, the Dow is only at about 8200 and would have to rise another 28% or so to return to 1999 levels."
"...Prof. William Hausman at the College of William & Mary long has urged the media to offer people inflation-adjusted stock charts. He says newspapers and analysts frequently point to the Dow's 2007 record of 14164.53 and talk about how far the Dow would need to climb to return to that level. In inflation-adjusted terms, however, the Dow in 2007 never quite surpassed its 2000 record, Prof. Hausman calculates. To return to an inflation-adjusted record now, he adds, the Dow would need to break 15000."
"It really puts in perspective how stocks are doing," he says.
"Stock analysts sometimes like to note that the Dow today is worth 27 times its value at its 1929 pre-crash peak, meaning that even if you bought at the worst moment, your stock still would be way up over time. In inflation-adjusted terms, however, the Dow today is only a little over twice its 1929 peak, according to Ned Davis Research."
"...Even with gold's swoon in recent days, the Dow looks a lot weaker over the past decade measured in gold than in dollars."
"In 1997, the Dow looked strong at 40 times the dollar value of an ounce of gold, notes John Hathaway, who oversees more than $5 billion at the Tocqueville Gold Fund at New York's Tocqueville Asset Management. With gold's rebound since 1999, the Dow now is worth about nine times an ounce of gold, meaning simply that gold has performed a lot better than the Dow."
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