Of Woodland Pools, Spring-Holes & Ditches
A friend told me about what appears to be a gorgeous hand-printed and illustrated collection of Thoreau’s writings on springtime fauna. (The regular edition costs $1600. For the deluxe edition you have to pay a bit more.) Abigail Rorer, the artist, has also illustrated Thoreau’s posthumous books Faith in a Seed and Wild Fruits, and has printed a number of broadsides based on his work, including quotations from the Journal about a fox chase and a toad, as well as a description of moose from The Maine Woods and a description of Walden Pond from Walden.
I was tickled to see that she uses a Vandercook proof press to do her work. I used a Vandercook proof press myself, long ago, when I printed my own broadside of the passage in Walden where Thoreau charms the perch with his flute.
John Bogle on riding out the storm
John Bogle, the father of index funds and founder of the Vanguard Group, was
interviewed on NPR a few days ago, advising investors not to panic and to stick to their investment strategy. Well, that’s what he always says, but so far he’s been right, and it’s good to hear him say it again when so many are telling us the sky is falling. (The phrase Vanguard used until recently was “stay the course,” but since that expression has become so closely connected with our soon-to-be-ex-president, they don’t say it so often. “Riding out the storm” is the term NPR uses in its headline.)
“As measured by the stock market,” Bogle says, “the value of American business in its entirety (the total U.S. stock market) has dropped since last October from $18 trillion to $10 trillion.” The Dow is down 35 percent from a year ago. Bogle says there’s no way the value of most American companies has fallen that much. Still, he cautions against any big moves right now — either buying or selling stocks.
Idlewild Books
One of the most enjoyable days in the week that Jenn and I took off earlier this month was spent wandering from one bookstore to another. We visited two of our favorites: St. Mark’s Bookshop and Forbidden Planet (more Jenn’s thing than mine, though we’ve been going there every time a new volume of 100 Bullets comes out). We also checked out a new one: Idlewild Books at 12 West 19th Street. It occupies a smallish but pleasantly light-filled second-story space, and the well-selected stock is organized not by topic but by geography (in the same way that I organized my Basket of Leaves). I noticed a beautiful one-volume import edition of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet on the shelf for Egypt.
Stocks = Top Returns (Usually)
Even if you believe, as I do, that financial advisors are generally much too conservative in their advice, overestimating the risk that stocks will drop in value and underestimating the risk that “safer” investments will fail to grow enough, this graph in the Times makes the point very dramatically. Here’s what the caption says:
Over the last century, a retirement portfolio of 100 percent stock has out-performed bond or stock-bond mixed portfolios in all but three years: 1932, 1941 and — unsurprisingly — this year so far. Stocks are the better bet, clearly, but the real winners are those workers who are able to tap into those retirement funds at market peaks, like 1999, when the rate of return on stocks was at 10 percent. Workers who retire this year are not quite so fortunate.
The caption, however, repeats another outmoded financial planning cliché: the assumption that retirees will move their retirement money into “safe” bonds or money market funds when they reach 65. With savings at record lows, and retirement lasting twenty or thirty years, even a retiree is a long-term investor. I would bet that many, if not most, retirees, are keeping a sizable chunk of their savings in the stock market.
Bulls, Bears, Donkeys, and Elephants
This chart from the New York Times seems too amazing to be true. It appears that the Republicans, the party of the rich, are historically not too successful at boosting stock market returns. (By showing the Republican figures in red-state red, the Times emphasizes the underperformance even further, perhaps a bit unfairly.)
As of Friday, a $10,000 investment in the S.& P. stock market index would have grown to $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents only, although that would be $51,211 if we exclude Herbert Hoover’s presidency during the Great Depression. Invested under Democratic presidents only, $10,000 would have grown to $300,671 at a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years.
