01/04/10 Alexandria, Virginia – The first ten years of the new millennium provided for a decade of “zeros” indeed… a “decade that began with such promise” ended up in abject failure for those heavily invested in the stock markets of the developed world.
According to the New York Times:
“…it became a decade that richly earned the name “the zeros.” For the entire developed world, that was just about the decade’s total return.
“The United States stock market lagged even that modest return. According to the MSCI indexes, which measure virtually all stock markets using consistent criteria, an investor in the American market who reinvested all dividends — and who somehow avoided all taxes and transaction costs for the decade — would have ended 2009 with 12 percent fewer dollars than when the decade began. That is an annual return of negative 1.3 percent.
“Even that calculation understates the sad news for stock investors. Because of inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, a 2009 dollar is worth about 78 cents in 1999 dollars.”
Many more details on how markets of the developed world fared, especially in contrast to the developing world, are available in New York Times coverage of the decade of zeros.
Rocky Vega
Rocky Vega is publisher of The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.
The Daily Reckoning is your premier source for making sense of the news Washington and Wall Street generate. Each business day, The Daily Reckoning calls on its stable of world-class writers and thinkers to show you how to get ahead.
Start your 100% FREE subscription to The Daily Reckoning today and you’ll get a free research report, “How to Survive the Fall of Social Security.” Simply enter your email address below to get your free report and join over 495,000 worldwide Daily Reckoning subscribers!
We Respect Your Privacy and We will
Never Share or Sell Your Email Address
