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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Robert O who wrote (28753)	3/2/1999 11:04:00 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

I'm afraid I was not speaking tongue in cheek. I understand how after reading "So much literature" it sounds wacky to you. But those same litterature do not tell you that during the '70s with inflation in double digits and DJIA staying flat, in real terms you lost more than 3/4 of your assets. If you take the numbers for 1966 to 1982, then the loss is closer to 80+%. There are literature that document this. Some of them are even in popular press like Forbes. But it is not something that is widely advertised. After all, the mutual fund and brokerage industries are very big businesses. And they stand to lose a lot if the public faith is broken. Depending on how accurate and how long a period data you want, there are several sources available. The government has some of the data which you can find in Federal Reserve web site (I forgot which division) and the department of Labor. These hardly go before 1945 and are best after 1970. You can find the inflation and real per capita GDP from them. You can then use that info to plot the DJIA chart against it. If this sounds like too much work (and believe me, I've manually checked volumes of economic data) then go to your library and get The K-Wave by David Barker. There is a chart of DJIA in real terms about 3/4 of the way into the book. For a longer term perspective, you can refer to The Great Wave which has price (and some population) data for the last few thousand years. regards, Sun Tzu