Word: markets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...endured not one but two market crashes - one at each end of the decade. You might recall the first Wall Street crash, when swooning tech stocks tanked the market from 2000 to 2001, not long after the Nasdaq hit an all-time high of 5049 on March 10, 2000. (Recent levels: 2150-2200.) The economy went into a recession that now seems laughably mild. What followed wasn't funny at all: the most divisive and confusing presidential election in history, a discombobulated drama that we once thought could occur only in the Third World...
...most likely still took a hit. To paraphrase the question Ronald Reagan posed years ago, Are you better off today than you were at the beginning of the decade? For most of us, the answer is a resounding no. Let us count the ways. For one thing, the stock market is down 26% since 2000, making this the worst decade for stocks. (Inflation-adjusted, it's even worse.) I remember Warren Buffett telling me at the beginning of the decade that there was no way the go-go returns of the 1990s were going to continue and that...
...economic narcissism was certainly the culprit in the devastation wrought by financial markets, which have subjected us to an increasingly frequent series of crashes, frauds and recessions. To a great degree, this was brought about by a lethal combination of irresponsible deregulation and accommodating monetary policies instituted by the Federal Reserve. Bankers and financial engineers had an unsupervised free-market free-for-all just as the increased complexity of financial products - e.g., derivatives - screamed out for greater regulation or at least supervision. Enron, for instance, was a bastard child of a deregulated utilities industry and a mind-bending financial alchemy...
Just as embarrassing was the colossal ineptitude of the big car companies: Ugly, low-quality cars with shameful gas mileage. Layers of redundant management that relied on amateurish financial controls. Insular thinking reinforced by decades of outsize market share. It was as if Detroit had drawn a road map for Toyota and Honda. And the Japanese drove right in, decimating the U.S. companies. In 1979, GM's U.S. employment peaked at 618,365. Today it's at 75,000 and falling fast. GM's U.S. market share, once about 50%, has fallen to about 20%. True, the quality and efficiency...
...also recall that the stock market usually mirrors political and economic trends. When the future appears to be stable and certain, the market moves up. When unexpectedly positive events occur, like the Internet boom in the 1990s, stocks produce above-average returns. This decade, the surprises were mostly negative, which drove the market lower. At some point, unanticipated positive developments will again drive the market higher: perhaps a sustained easing of tensions between the West and radical Islam, breakthroughs in green technology (think energy sources) or something completely unimagined. If we were too positive heading into the 2000s...