Word: stockely
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...soaring as high as 1052 at the start of 1973. But it has been a ride to nowhere; after all the ups and downs, the average is just about where it was a dozen years ago. Moreover, even those figures badly understate just how dismal the performance has been. Stock prices have been stagnating at best while prices of just about everything else have been soaring, and as a result the purchasing power of money invested in corporate stocks has drastically declined. If the Dow average in each month since January 1965 had been deflated by the rate of increase...
Shares of some of the nation's biggest, best-known and most successful companies have done far worse than the averages indicate. The Singer Co. hit a price peak of over $93 a share in 1972; it is now down to around $24. DuPont stock, at about 113, is selling for less than half its price of 261 in 1965. Among glamour issues, Polaroid has nosedived from a high of 149 in 1972 to around 30 now. Most startling of all: General Motors shares peaked out at almost 114 in 1965 and are now down to around 65-even...
...long price stagnation is probably psychological. In the mid-'60s, people widely-and wrongly-believed that Keynesian economics had given governments the tools to control inflation and recession and keep business rising constantly. Recalls Arnold Bernhard, president of the Value Line Funds: "In the '60s stocks were bought on the assumption that growth would go on for ever." The economy of the '70s has been dominated by inflation, recession and fears of energy shortages, all adding up to that worst of stock market poisons-uncertainty. Complains David Grove, a member of the TIME Board of Economists: "Businessmen...
...market's biggest single enemy in the '70s undoubtedly-though ironically-is inflation. Stocks used to be considered a hedge against inflation, on the rather naive assumption that if prices generally rose, so would prices of shares, but now inflation is almost universally considered bad for the market. One reason: many investors believe that a large part of the rise in corporate profits is an illusory result of inflation. So a dollar of company earnings is no longer worth as much on the price of that company's stock as it used to be. Even in late...
Inflation also vastly increases investors' desire to avoid risk: people who think they will need every penny to pay rising food, rent and fuel bills will not put their spare cash into an investment, like stocks, that might go down. And inflation gives them an attractive alternative investment by pushing up interest rates. Though interest rates wiggle up and down, they are far higher than in the early 1960s. So floods of investment money are being diverted from the stock market to seek a relatively safe, guaranteed return in bonds and other fixed-interest securities...