Quote from Specterx:
How do you square this with the experience of Japan? They went through a similar credit/RE bust, and America's savings situation is much worse.
Interestingly, just as we've seen with the US indexes, a year after the top the Nikkei had lost about a third of its value - 38k to 23-26k. That was in 1991; N225 is now at 8,500. I don't know about you but the SPX has collapsed far faster than I personally was expecting.
I think we won't get it this bad if only because our population is still growing, and therefore the economy=stock market will grow in absolute terms (in Japan, even GDP growth of zero means an increase in per-capita terms, though evidently it's not the stuff of bull markets). But, the historical warnings are there nonetheless. It goes without saying that a similar 20-year performance on the S&P would be catastrophic for the USA, due to our reliance on 401(k)s and the like. You thought the $40 trillion SS hole was bad before...