1920s/1990s

[Doug Henwood]

The other day, Samuel Brittan devoted his Financial Times column to the
madness of the U.S. stock market. (For the moment, it's at
<http://www.ft.com/hippocampus/qcf5b2.htm>, but the FT doesn't keep stuff
up for long. The thing has been circulated on other lists, but not this
one.) Brittan is no alarmist - he's a pretty orthodox, level-headed,
verging-on-boring guy, and he says "This is the first time that I recall
expressing a view on stock markets anywhere." But his phrase for Wall
Street today is "nonsense on stilts" (which comes from Jeremy Bentham, I'm
told).

Brittan's article was decorated with one of those inevitable charts
comparing the 1920s to the 1990s. Those were popular in the 1980s just
before the crash, but I don't recall seeing any in this even-madder decade.
The FT's web site doesn't have the chart, so I made one myself. It's at
<http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/Stox90svs20s.html>. Uncanny, but as we all
know, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Doug