Worst Decade Ever for U.S. Stocks

The New York Times reports on the nation’s “surge” in temporary workers. Historically, in the wake of a downturn, employers have brought on temporary employees in the few months before bringing back permanent hires. But this time, that turnaround is taking longer than usual. The paper says, “As demand rose after the last two recessions, in the early 1990s and in 2001, employers moved more quickly. They added temps for only two or three months before stepping up the hiring of permanent workers. Now temp hiring has risen for four months, the economy is growing, and still corporate managers have been reluctant to shift to hiring permanent workers, relying instead on temps and other casual labor easily shed if demand slows again.”

Today's Washington Post has a piece about everything the Fed did wrong in the lead-up to the financial crisis. The paper says, “Just as the Fed had failed to protect borrowers from the consequences of subprime lending, so, too, had it failed to protect banks.” And—mind you, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has yet to be officially confirmed for his second term—the paper continues, “The Obama administration wants the Fed to police financial risks to the broader economy, a job that entails sorting real threats from the constant false alarms. But in the dying days of the great moderation, the Fed repeatedly failed to discern which warnings were worth heeding.”

The Wall Street Journal bears the bad news this morning and tells us that “the U.S. stock market is wrapping up what is likely to be its worst decade ever.” If you didn’t get the message the first time, the article continues, “In nearly 200 years of recorded stock-market history, no calendar decade has seen such a dismal performance as the 2000s.” New York Stock Exchange stocks have lost an average of 0.5 percent per year for the past decade. The Yale University finance professor who crunched the numbers “estimates it would take a 3.6% rise between now and year end for the decade to come in better than the 0.2% decline suffered by stocks during the Depression years of the 1930s.”

The New York Times reports that “many teenagers” are deactivating their Facebook accounts because they’re too distracting. While the article lacks numbers on just how many users are leaving the social networking site, it cites a psychologist who has treated patients for the equivalent of Facebook “withdrawal” and perspectives from school administrators. It seems that Facebook makes it simple to join, but hard to quit. The paper explains, “But Facebook does not make it easy to leave for long. Deactivating an account requires checking off one of six reasons — 'I spend too much time using Facebook,' is one. 'This is temporary. I’ll be back,' is another. And it is easy to reactivate an account by entering the old login and password.”

Barnes & Noble (BKS) is offering $100 gift certificates to customers who preordered its e-reader the Nook but who won’t actually get their hands on it by Christmas Eve. The Wall Street Journal points out that the Nook costs only $259, so the gift certificate is worth a good chunk of the price. The e-mail from the bookseller says, "If for whatever reason we are not able to ship your Nook in time for arrival by Dec. 24, we will send you an e-mail notification on Dec. 23 with a $100 Barnes & Noble.com online gift certificate to use as you wish at BN.com."

The New York Times tells us about yet another silver lining of the recession: The big screen will make more than $10 billion in ticket sales by the end of the year, which marks “a near-record that is helping to offset a steep drop in DVD revenue.” Thanks to popular sequels and extra revenue from 3-D screenings, 2009 has been a good year for the movie business. Still, The Hangover and Harry Potter can’t save the whole industry. The paper explains, “The robust box office is helping the industry cope with the DVD downturn. In the first six months of the year, DVD revenue fell by about $1 billion compared with the previous year, analysts say, as consumers tightened their discretionary spending and as video-on-demand and online viewing became more popular.”