Richard Salsman @ Forbes: A Golden Decade Of Government Failure

The past decade was “golden” for investors — but only for those who actually held gold and avoided such typically touted holdings as stocks or bonds. Even as finance professors kept insisting that investors “hold stocks for the long run,” one could observe gold’s price increasing by 410%, while U.S. stock prices declined 10%. More amazing perhaps, especially for today’s stock-obsessed advisors, gold has registered gains for ten consecutive years — a performance consistency that U.S. stocks have never achieved.The only way to have prepared oneself to benefit from this decade-long golden performance was to distrust government’s more invasive role in the economy — a premise as rare today as gold itself. Most policymakers, economists, investment  advisors and journalists applaud a larger government role in the economy, which is one reason that Keynes — who rationalized statist policies — has made a comeback after being discredited in the prior three decades.Read the rest...