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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (40021)	12/29/2009 6:10:25 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 71588

How BAD was the last decade for the market???????????????? Adjusted for Inflation, Dow's Gains Are Puny << Great charts! >> 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." online.wsj.com

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (40021)	12/30/2009 8:23:37 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened. There actually isn't a huge number of decades on record. Depending on exactly what figures are being counted as on the record we have something like a half dozen to a dozen decades. And beginning and ending at the 0 years is rather arbitrary, I think it likely that other 10 year periods (at least the period to the deepest point of the depression) had private-sector employment losses. Also while I haven't checked (I'm sure you'll point out if I'm wrong) population growth was probably lower than many of those decades, less population growth, all else being equal, typically means less new private sector jobs. Not that growth was unusually low, but both birth rates and immigration rates where higher during a number of those decades. Looking at what stands out for the last decade or so its the rapid increase in government spending. Other decades have had more rapid increases but not many, and except for the 30s they where all responses to major wars, while currently we are engaged in war, the war or wars (depending on how you delineate and define them) are small as a portion of our economy or as a percentage of the population. If you increase government spending and employment that will put downward pressure on private employment.