The Lost Decade

I’ve been hearing a lot lately that his decade will come to be known as the “Lost Decade”. It’s a label being attributed to how we’ve managed our finances during the past 10 years. Here are some stats:

1. The S&P began 2000 at 1,469 and is now 27 percent lower at 1,068. This decade trails only the 1930s as the worst in the modern investing era
2. In 2000, consumer credit outstanding in the U.S. (excluding mortgage loans) was in the vicinity of $1.5 trillion dollars. Now it’s in the neighborhood of $2.6 trillion
3. The Personal Savings Rate at the beginning of the decade was in the 2.5% range and we know that for most of this decade, this measurement was either at zero or was a negative number (except for the past few months when the mattress seemed like a better option).

I guess it’s a little hard to argue that this boom decade we experienced has really put us in a hole. Now with unemployment reaching early the 80’s level of double-digits, tha national debt at numbers our forefathers could never have comprehended, and an economy whose success and health is primarily located on the backs of consumers, maybe we are lost.

Who would have thought that Y2K would take 10 years to boot up?

Here’s a great article from Dave Carpenter, an AP personal finance writer http://www.miamiherald.com/business/breaking-news/v-fullstory/story/1242836.html