>So, Doug, any calls yet?
Not really, no. One call from a lurker on this list (who really doesn't count for that and similar reasons), and one call from someone who used to work with Cooper at KPFK and who's now at Marketplace (so that doesn't really count either). Otherwise, the phone has been still.
>Gotta love the headline in the "Companies and Markets" section of the
>Financial Times: "Investors hope the great bear will not return --
>Parallels with the 1973-74 crisis can be over-emphasised." Quite a
>retrenchment in tone from 10 months ago.
>
>I think you calculated at the last stock market a few months back that we
>were within a whisker of 73-74 loss in percentage terms. So we must have
>surpassed it now, yes?
Yup. I think the S&P is off 49% from its peak (haven't run the numbers lately), vs. around 45% for 1973-74. The Nasdaq, of course, surpasses this bigtime.
>One parallel I was curious about offhand -- was there a big growth in
>popular participation in the stock market before 73-74? And did it tail
>off for a while thereafter?
I don't have the exact numbers at hand, but the stylized picture is: low public involvement in the 1950s and early 1960s, rising public involvement in the later 60s and early 70s (the Go-Go Years, Nifty Fifty, etc.), extreme public shunning in the late 1970s and well into the 1980s, and a major rise after 1995.
Doug