Stocks down more than during Great Depression
In the last 82 years — the history of the Standard & Poor’s 500 …it has never seen a 10-year stretch as bad as the one that ended last month.
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 10 years after the crash, through Sept. 30, 1939, the compound annual decline of the stock market… after factoring in deflation… was 2.8 percent a year.
Posted by James on Saturday, February 07, 2009