Economy

to below that on Sept 26, went down further, and since then has recovered a bit then fallen back. Anyway, its now down 23.6% from its Jan 3 all-time-high. And down 23.1% year-to-date.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EGSPC/history?p=%5EGSPC

Its ugly. A 6 month graph of the S&P 500 looks quite a lot worse than the 6 month graph of the Dow above in the OP.

In the Dow graph, it looks like its making a nice mini-recovery. In the S&P 500 graph, it looks like its floundering around very near its bear market low.

For many years the stock market has been overvalued, as measured by the Shiller CAPE PE ratio and Buffet's favorite metric - the total stock value to GDP ratio. But that overvaluation was justified by the main alternative to stocks -- fixed income things like CD's, bonds, savings accounts, money market funds -- had such historically diminutive interest rates. Thus spawing the acronym TINA (There Is No Alternative) to stocks.

Well, now there is. 2y and 5y and 10y Treasuries are over 4%, corporate bonds somewhat higher. Yeah yeah, I know I know, these are considerably less than the inflation rate, so this sucks an egg.

But have stocks been beating inflation? No, they've lost 23.1% since the beginning of the year in nominal dollars (using the S&P 500) and nearly an ADDITIONAL 5.9% or so loss in purchasing power since December. (CPI: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUSR0000SA0 ).

That comes to a combined loss of 27.6% in purchasing power. A $100,000 S&P 500 stock portfolio at the beginning of the year now has $72,360 in purchasing power.

(1-.231)*(1-.059)=0.7236,
1-0.7236 = 0.2764

Yes, I believe, as has been true throughout stock market history, that it will recover and go on to new highs. I've posted that one many times here before. But I don't think a sustained recovery will begin until interest rates head on down.