Equity prices are about where they were a decade and more ago—ignoring dividends.  Therefore, could it be so easy as to say that no rational investor would ever invest in equities?  But, might not a rational investor first inquire about the value of equities now?  Might not the rational investor inquire how much higher the earnings and dividends of America’s non-financial companies are now, compared to where they were ten years ago, even as stock prices have, on net, languished?

If not, I guess there was no chance of the article mentioning Jeremy Siegel’s 2009 work on the other thirteen ten-year periods since 1871 in which equities provided no return. He found that no subsequent ten-year period returned less than ten percent after inflation (vs. the average 6.6%). The two ten-year periods of no return before this one—which ended in 1935 and 1974, respectively—ushered in periods of far-above-average returns, for there is nothing in the world as productive as the entrepreneurialism and innovation of American business after it’s been beaten down.