S&P 500 Sets Yet Another Fake Record This Year


From the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. stocks kicked off the second quarter with broad gains Tuesday, propelling the S&P 500 index to a seventh record close of the year.

I’ll cop to being sort of pedantic here, but no, the S&P 500 didn’t set a record today, let alone its seventh of the year. Time series like this only make sense if you adjust for inflation, and if you do that the S&P closed 10 percent below its August 2000 peak. Granted, the S&P 500 has more than doubled since 2008, an immensely more impressive performance than, say, median income or the unemployment rate, but it’s still not in record territory.

If you’re curious to see what the real S&P 500 looks like, it’s in the chart below.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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