Worst Decade In 50 Years?

Here are two sources of stats that show the 2000′s to have been the worst decade in at least 50 years…

Current Decade Rates as Worst in 50 Years
Pew Research Center
As the current decade draws to a close, relatively few Americans have positive things to say about it. By roughly two-to-one, more say they have a generally negative (50%) rather than a generally positive (27%) impression of the past 10 years. This stands in stark contrast to the public’s recollection of other decades in the past half-century. When asked to look back on the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, positive feelings outweigh negative in all cases.
To be sure, the passage of time may affect the way people view these historical periods. For example, had we asked the public’s impression of the 1970s in December of 1979, the negatives may well have outweighed the positives.

By a wide margin, the 9/11 terrorist attacks are seen as the most important event of the decade, with Barack Obama’s election as president a distant second – even among his political supporters. And the sour view of the decade is broad-based, with few in any political or demographic group offering positive evaluations.
Happy to put the 2000s behind them, most Americans are optimistic that the 2010s will be better. Nearly six-in-ten (59%) say they think the next decade will be better than the last for the country as a whole, though roughly a third (32%) think things will be worse.
read full article here…Current Decade Rates as Worst in 50 Years: Overview – Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

The next…

If You Think the Past Decade Was Bad For Stocks, Wait Till You See This
Elliottwave.com By Robert Folsom
A well-known business magazine recently published a story with this headline:
Stocks: The “Loss” Decade
A disastrous ten years for the stock market ends in just a month. Will the turning of a new decade change investors’ luck?
One sentence from the story itself tells you most of what you need to know: “The ten years since Y2K are on track to produce the worst total returns for investors since the 1930s.”
Of course, no one should really be surprised by a story that says the stock indexes did poorly over the past decade. That’s not news. The facts in the article more or less repeat what our own Elliott Wave Financial Forecast reported last March, complete with this chart:
It’s safe to say that this business magazine article is the first of many the media will run before the year’s end, as part of their “decade wrap-up” stories. And like this story, most or all those like will share the same basic assumption: stock investors did poorly because the stock indexes did poorly.
And that assumption, dear reader, is erroneous. The truth is far uglier.
read article here… If You Think the Past Decade Was Bad For Stocks, Wait Till You See This – Elliott Wave International.