Worst Decade Ever
Floyd Norris notes that the decade through January was the worst decade ever for the stock market after adjusting for inflation:
NYT: Over the 10 years through January, an investor holding the stocks in the S.& P.’s 500-stock index, and reinvesting the dividends, would have lost about 5.1 percent a year after adjusting for inflation...
Until now, the worst 10-year period, by that measure, was the period that ended September 1974, with a compound annual decline of 4.3 percent...
For the current period, the total return was negative, at minus 2.6 percent a year, even before factoring in inflation.
But what about after the Great Crash? Wasn't that decade horrendous?
Perhaps surprisingly, the 10 years after the 1929 crash were not that bad by this measure... The deflation of the 1930s helped the after-inflation of the stock market to look better.
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