SILENT STOCKS.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the stock market is in its "longest funk since 1970." Shares are trading where they were nine years ago. Moreover, the normal rules of the game aren't working quite right:

Conventional stock-market wisdom holds that if investors buy a broad range of stocks and hold them, they will do better than they would in other investments. But that rule hasn't held up for stocks bought in the late 1990s or 2000.Over the past nine years, the S&P 500 is the worst-performing of nine different investment vehicles tracked by Morningstar, including commodities, real-estate investment trusts, gold and foreign stocks. Big U.S. stocks were outrun even by Treasury bonds, which historically perform much less well than stocks. Adjusted for inflation, Treasurys are up 4.7% a year over the past nine years, and up 5.8% a year since the March 2000 stock peak. An index of commodities has shown about twice the annual gains of bonds, as have real-estate investment trusts.

Yikes. Looking at all this, Dean Baker says, "The WSJ is too polite to ask this question, but I'm not. Suppose we had invested Social Security in the stock market?"