http://online.barrons.com/public/page/9_0210-indexespeyields.html

As of Friday, May 22, 2009, the S&P500′s dividend yield was 2.56 percent. Actual dividends per share in the S&P500 have fallen from $29 a year ago to $23 today.

The NY Times ran an extraordinary article last January that didn’t get the attention it deserved. The upshot was that “As a group, shareholders were paid about $200 billion more than their companies earned” between the fourth quarter of 2004 through the third quarter of 2008. Easy money and lax lending standards let companies use borrowed money to pay dividends and buy back shares. That era upended the hallowed Wall Street maxim “Dividends don’t lie.”

Here’s a link to the NY Times article by Floyd Norris (“Easy Loans Financed Dividends”):
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/business/09norris.html

bush and nixon were both unpopular presidents — so what? psychology was the same — so what? the market went up 30% and then down 40% — so what? parallels aren’t causal arguments, and similarities aren’t relationships. (they can get auctioned on ebay, if a piece of toast looks like the virgin mary.) imagine the state of medicine, if we simply diagnosed one patient because he or she “looked like” another patient.

the illusion is that graphical description gives us causal insight (“technical analysis”), but it doesn’t. it simply formalizes visual (not even quantitative) similarities. nothing at all about volume, about leverage, about exchange rates, about fundamentals … just a line moving up and down.

we could learn something from the line, if we systematically compared its behavior to the elements of a causal model, used the comparison to identify driving variables, and then used the driving variables to predict the future movement of the line. i don’t believe that has ever been tried with graphical description. instead, one graphical description is compared to another graphical description, and the hunt for historical parallels is on.

goes back to the theory that it is not a stock market… but a market of stocks…

I knew one or both of you were very concerned about the DJTA. Thanks and GL.

DL may have mentioned it but yes, I brought this up about 3 weeks ago. Thanks for your insight.

I think you may have been the one who a few weeks ago was concerned about the DJTA . Well it has formed a perfect H-S and I can find only a few people talking about it, even in trader land. No mention on The Street.com. I don’t watch CNBC, but from what I understand they are a little giddy. If everyone were talking about it, a H-S almost never works. On that last stab down it almost gave way. Also if you look almost a year ago to the week, OIH continued up on sheer rotation even after stocks began to fall. So everything seems to be set up, and if it is, OIH should begin to fall. Prediction? The H-S will be confirmed. If we do start down in a big way, it will be very ominous and eerie. Friday being down would seem to be bad too.

The great wave : price revolutions and the rhythm of history / David Hackett Fischer.

Try setting the compatibility view for this site. I doubt that XP is the problem. It’s either the browser or the site or ISP.

Curmudgeon:
There was a book that Barry had in his recommended reading that would probably interest you, although it was heavy going at times. It talked about the cycles of economic history going back to midieval times, with plenty of charts and graphs of prices and population. Talked about the factors you just mentioned. It didn’t imply that these had a regular period, but showed common trends within them. Of course I can’t find it on Barry’s list any more and can’t remember the name. Written about 1995. Implied that we were reaching another of those turning points, since the epochs generally ended with large accumulations of wealth, economic disparity, and social and economic breakdowns, e.g. the French Revolution.

Yeah, MA and I were discussing that earlier on this thread. Sad. I agree with Swampfox @ 3:19. Life will go on, but the intervening period between here and the end of this deleveraging event will be heartbreaking for many.