Check out the charts in this article by Mike Maloney. His conclusion?
I think at this point I have proven my point beyond a shadow of a doubt… I think I’ve presented an air tight case… and I think it’s time to pronounce it “case closed”… the general equities markets (a.k.a. stock markets) are crashing, and have been since 1999-2001, depending on how you measure it. Even though the Dow is going up in price, if everything else is going up in price faster than the Dow, then the Dow is crashing in relative terms. In fact, I can’t think of anything you can measure the Dow with that doesn’t show it crashing… except of course, dollars.
Maloney's article needs to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt. He picked the Dow's peak, in the midst of the Y2k bubble, as his baseline, but the Y2k bubble was a highly inflated period that does not represent the general behavior of the index. Accordingly, his conclusions are quite a bit more hysterical than is really true. That said, the U.S. economy is currently seeing its worst performance in a generation, and won't likely get better anytime soon. Certainly not until Bush is out of office and the long-term catastrophes he has unleashed have been fixed.
Also, the Dow is only one index, and one that probably does not reflect the investment portfolio of most investors. A balanced portfolio would include, for example, equities from outside the U.S., and many of those — in particular, emerging markets in Asia & Latin America — have seen spectacular increases in recent years…increases that offset the U.S. performance.