Back When The Dow Hit 14,164, the Infamous Two-Year Anniversary

Yes, next week we’ll hit a rather infamous anniversary.  Two years ago on October 9, 2007 the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit 14,164.  In fact, the Dow actually hit 14,166 during the day on October 9th.  And it even hit a momentary all-time high of 14,198 two days later on October 11th.

But that’s, unfortunately, all history, isn’t it?

Now — two years later — we sit at a ‘recovered’ 30% loss.  That’s much better than the roughly 54% loss the Dow experienced as recently as March 2009 when the Dow bottomed out at roughly 6,500, but it’s still a huge step backward for average Americans looking to the stock market for investment or, gulp, actual income (what my parents used to call ‘retirement’).

Compare what we’ve experienced the past two years with what transpired in the aftermath of September 11 . . .

Just before 9-11 the Dow hovered at 10,000.  It then sank to 8,062 on September 21 (if only momentarily — it hit that low during the day) only to return to 10,000 levels in six months, in other words, by March 2002.  That’s a 20% loss with a 6-month recovery.

Some may question raising such a comparison.  But it’s raised in the spirit that you should not hide yourself from the Truth, that the fact-of-the-matter is we’ve done much more to damage our own Economy than Al-Qaeda . . . that people who actually intended to do us harm — while devastatingly impactful on many — could not deter the American spirit writ large.  We’re resilient.  We’re democratic.  And, perhaps most importantly, we embrace a system that allows for us to seek out and maximize the potential of nearly innumerable possibilities.

And that’s all good (our resiliency, not the horror of 9-11).  But if that’s all true, what’s been able to cause the turmoil in our Economy?  And what should we reflect on as we arrive at the two-year anniversary of 14,164?

Well, first of all, Bernie Madoff proves that there’s certainly no shortage of greed in America.  (I hope you rot in jail, Bernie.  Seriously, I hope you rot in jail.)  Enron is another.  (Ken Lay, I’m glad you’ve passed — If there was one, good decent bone in your body it was to die before taxpayers had to pay to incarcerate you for the rest of your life.)  The accounting downfall of Arthur Andersen for — get this — not being accountants.  The list goes on, the least of which being the latest and greatest mortgage crisis that nearly put us in a Depression.  So, greed is certainly a major component.

The second.  How about ’something for nothing’ and wherever or whenever we forgot the old ‘too good to be true’ adage?  I get that in a country of 300,000,000 people that there’s always the potential of one person being able to con another, but there’s a big difference between an outright con and, pardon me, buyer stupidity.  Someone is almost by definition always going to be conned, but nearly everyone?  All at once?  That stretches the imagination and raises as another major component, what we’ll refer to as ‘buyer savviness and prudence’.

Finally, and this hits close to home on the previous point, there’s an important mix, or lack thereof, of information and intelligence, namely ‘access’ to information and ‘availability’ of intelligence.  The antithesis of this, as a perfect example, was the after hours activity by some investment / trading firms of posting trades for preferred customers, but at the more favorable, earlier market prices, a clearly unfair and inequal practice that ceased once everyone else learned of it.  This one is tricky, no doubt, but it’s the third component and certainly related to some combination of access / availability.

These are hard issues to work through, but working through them is the only option.  More key?  We need to acknowledge, i.e. admit, to ourselves that there are serious structural, behavioral, and even psychological matters to address.  To address them gives hope for future stability and vitality of the American Economy — To ignore them and / or believe self or macro-motivated poor behavior won’t get the better of us will be proved to be, well, foolish.