Chart shows stock-market not at new highs

23 Apr, 2014 by John Seiler

Print this article Font size -16+

With the stock market soaring again, it seems that happy days are here again for the economy. Except a new Chart of the Day shows that the Dow Jones Industrial Average, when charted against the price of gold — the only real money — is nowhere near record territory.

This chart jibes with other analyses I have run here showing that the economy peaked around 2000, and the so-called Bush “recovery” was completely phony. What happened was that Fed Chairman Greenspan, re-appointed by Bush and backed by him, panicked after 9/11/2001 and inflated the dollar to record highs, which caused inflation. That’s why gas today costs four times what it did in 2000.

The inflation also goosed stock prices — but it all was fake. The Great Recession didn’t begin in 2007 or 2008, but in 2001.

President Obama and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke only have continued the Bush-Greenspan inflationary folly. And new Fed Chairperson Janet Yellen so far is giving us even more of the same.

It’s mainly Republicans who are responsible for this. Reagan’s tax cuts of 1981 and 1983 sparked the huge increase in the real value of stocks, as with the rest of the economy, as the chart shows. Then in the late 1990s, the Republican Congress, led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, worked with Democratic President Bill Clinton for tax cuts and budget restraint.

But Bush, Greenspan and Bernanke all are Republicans. And the Republican congresses of the early half of the 2000s — after Gingrich left — also were in charge and could have changed things, for example by putting us back on the gold standard.

Republicans’ campaign slogan this fall should be, “Give us more seats in the House and control again of the Senate so we can be just as irresponsible as we were 10 years ago.”