Mark Hulbert Whistles Past the Graveyard

In his column in yesterday's New York Times business section (Strategies: "The Road Back from the '29 Crash Wasn't So Long After All"), Hulbert writes that, although the Dow didn't match its 1929 peak until 1954, investors who bought and held the Dow at its 1929 peak would have been made whole in real terms four and a half years later, thanks to double digit deflation and double digit dividend yields. Of course, today we have a fiat currency and a Federal Reserve committed to fighting deflation, and dividend yields on Dow stocks average in the low single digits, so Hulbert's example doesn't seem terribly apposite.