Can we see the chart of S&P versus gold?

(This is not a rhetorical question: I honestly don’t know.)

Rant: It’s sickening reading these “portals.” Everyone has a hidden agenda blathering half-truths. And on the whole, it’s a zero-sum race laying and clearing these epistemological landmines.

I was a graduate of Stanford GSB back when people were just learning the Efficient Market theory and the Capital Asset Pricing Model and a lot of other stuff which has since been shown to be bunk. Alpha, beta and Sharpe ratio were not widely computed, and heads of investment banks, God help me, thought that the cost of capital was the inverse of the P/E ratio. Over the years I learned that the market is not efficient, that it reacts to the news when it occurs even though it’s been widely expected for a long time, and that all markets can be manipulated for an extended period of time until the manipulator stares takeout (regulatory or financial) in the face. The market is a device for measuring the balance of fear and greed in the marketplace about any set of economic expectations, micro and macro. In the short run. It discounts the future very inaccurately, gyrates on rumor and typically over-reacts on the upside and the downside. In the long run it’s pretty darn good. And I have some advice for all you right-wing doomsayers out there: Never bet long-term against the eagle with the thunderbolts in his talons.

I wouldn’t say that directly harming corporations generally helps individuals. But it can certainly happen for people to do well while corporate profits are declining, as is the opposite. The two are not closely related.