MARKET FACTOID

BUSINESS WEEK--There are still six months left in this decade, but it is not too soon to start drafting its obituary. Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at Standard & Poor’s, is already looking at the decade’s stock market legacy. It’s ugly. The S&P 500 is down 39.22% from Dec. 31, 1999 through Monday’s close.

“We need a 63.79% advance just to break-even for the decade,” Silverblatt says. That’s not going to happen by Dec. 31. “The last negative decade was the 1930s, -41.77%,” according to Silverblatt. Annualized, stocks lost 5.12% so far this decade; in the 1930s decade of the Great Depression they lost 5.26%.