Sue, Izzy's comment just about sums it up. At any given time, something is doing well, whether it's stock, gold, Tickle Me Elmo's or whatever. Too bad no one can reliably pick the winners before they go up.

Even over the long-term, I'm beginning to wonder about stocks. Even over really long periods of time, when you look at countries like Japan, you have to wonder. Remember when everyone was afraid of Japan, Inc.? Remember when people thought that the Japanese might literally buy the whole country out from under us? Does anyone remember the peak of the Nikkei stock index? 39,000 in 1989. What was today's close? 10,000. Japan's stock market has never been close to getting back to even since 1989, and their economy is still lackadaisical to this day. Similar to our problem right now, they had assets that became way overinflated in value, like real estate, but that bubble finally popped. I don't know--harbinger of things to come?

And another thing has been bugging me for the past couple months. I finally got around to reading Kunstler's The Long Emergency. When you look at these charts of stock market performance, they go back pretty far, like the late 1800's. But they really only go as far back as the discovery of oil in this country--plentiful, cheap oil to power a young, booming, rapidly industrializing country. What happens when oil is neither cheap nor plentiful? Can we expect the same economic performance going forward? To be honest, I'm starting to wonder since I read that book. Thinking about our infrastructure, our foreign policy, where our food and daily goods come from, I realize how utterly and completely dependent we are on cheap oil.

China's meteoric rise could be hamstrung by the fact that they have finally started developing in the latter half of the Age of Oil. Bummer for them.