Paul B. Farrell: Dot-com to fiscal-cliff mania, we’re just in deeper. Now bond mania. Political mania. Fiscal-cliff mania. Fear-another-recession mania … Wall Street, Main Street, all addicted to hot new manias … More is never enough. We’re our own worst enemies. In denial. Lost. And killing America.
Investmentwatchblog.com
December 27th, 2012
By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch
Remember December 1999? Wild dot-com mania. Just 13 years ago. I wrote about the year’s top 19 funds. Insane annual returns: 179% to 323%. Wall Street was hot … Stocks roared … Investors expected 100% plus returns and laughed at 30% index-fund returns. Early retirement was all the buzz at barbershops and neighborhood barbecues.
Then the tech crash. Two wars. Thirty-month recession. By 2005, global real estate was a hot new mania. Till the 2008 bank-credit meltdown. Another recession, trillions more new war debt. New Normal. Stocks not so hot.
Now bond mania. Political mania. Fiscal-cliff mania. Fear-another-recession mania … Wall Street, Main Street, all addicted to hot new manias … More is never enough. We’re our own worst enemies. In denial. Lost. And killing America.
Here’s a time capsule, my Dec. 30, 1999, column. See why nothing’s changed in 13 years, why we’re just in deeper.
The dart-throwing chimpanzee won. And big. He didn’t just beat all Internet and technology funds. He beat all 10,000 mutual funds. Raven the chimp is now Raven the Champ! In the 1999 race for top performance honors, the chimp made a monkey out of every darn (so-called) “professional” money manager on Wall Street and everywhere in America. His Monkeydex Index beat the best-of-the-best of all mutual funds run by America’s top managers.
The Rest…HERE
