What have we learned from the crash? Nothing lasts forever. Even bear markets.

Numbers can talk. And one of the key indicators of this year’s Fortune 500 — the companies’ stock market value — is absolutely shouting. It’s telling us that nothing is forever, and that people, businesses, and governments can no longer depend on rising financial markets to bail them out.

The talking number is $4.1 trillion — the amount by which the market value of the Fortune 500 companies with publicly traded shares fell this year compared with 2008′s list. The decline, 37%, is by far the biggest in both dollars and percentage since we started tracking the market values of America’s biggest companies 22 years ago. The two-year decrease, $5.3 trillion and 43%, is a record as well.

Since the 500′s peak valuation in spring 2007 — our stock market years end in late March — the global boom has been replaced by global doom, and economies throughout the world have gone south. And get this: The 500′s valuation is down 13% from 11 years ago. Thus, big-company U.S. stocks have been dead money for more than a decade. Had they risen at their historical rate after 1998, they’d be worth more than twice as much as they are now. So much for the myth that stocks as a group are a fundamentally reliable investment over the long term. Read the rest of this entry »