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Reuters and Yahoo Finance report that the Dow 30 NASDAQ and S&P 500 stock indexes all reached record high levels on Monday. According to Yahoo this last occurred in 1999.
Reuters cited as possible factors speculation that the central bank will not soon raise interest rates, rising oil prices due to speculation that oil producers may cut production, and a Bureau of Labor Statistics report issued earlier in the month.
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New York Stock Indexes Reach New Highs
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Life is to you a dashing and bold adventure.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 16 2016, @05:30PM
You're right.
Compared to what exactly? GBP? Euro?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday August 16 2016, @06:53PM
I generally measure monetary values in SF paperback books. It worked for a long time, but these days I think e-readers may have destroyed it's values, so I should probably switch to the price of a pound of chocolate candy. (Bread got destroyed as a measure when they started pumping air into it.)
You need the measure to be something that has a reasonably wide market, and a reasonably consistent value. Wheat is good, but it's hard for an individual to determine what the current price would actually be to buy a pound. (Buying it at a health food store ensures that you're paying premium prices.) Possibly I should switch to canned beans or frozed mixed vegetables...but you need a historical record to have any sense of continuity.
E.g.:
Pepsi Cola hits the spot
12 full ounces, that's a lot,
Twice as much for a nickel too
Pepsi Cola is the drink for you.
That gives a good measure of the value of money. The date was 1954. So one measure is based on 12 ounces of cheap flavored cola. Unfortunately, they started using corn syrup as a sweetener, so it's no longer the same product, and that destroys the accuracy of the measure, but one could measure against the typical size sold, and get an approximate translation.
Another problem is you don't want to use something whose price is highly manipulated, so oil is a bad choice. When paperback books cost $.35, a gallon of gas cost $.30.
Monetary price doesn't, in itself, mean anything.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 16 2016, @09:57PM
The metric I tend to prefer as a rough measure is a 90% silver 1964 half-dollar (which is a mite cheaper than a 1913 gold half-eagle):
- Face value of 50 cents; face value presumed to be AT LEAST as high as the melt value of the coin's silver
- Approximate silver content in a pre-64 half-dollar: one-third of an ounce
- Current spot price of silver: roughly 19 dollars per ounce
- Divide current spot of silver by three, divide face value of 50 cents by the result to see the approximate devaluation of the "dollar" since 1964: ~7.8% of the value of a 1964 dollar remains in a 2016 dollar
Inflation is much, much worse if the metric used is a 1908-ish $5 half-eagle "Indian head" produced just before the imposition of the Federal Reserve.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday August 16 2016, @07:14PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings