Dow stock index closes above 36,000 points for first time
CBSN
The Dow Jones Industrial Average on Tuesday closed above 36,000 points for the first time, a milestone for the blue-chip index and a capstone on one of the best-known — and most ridiculed — stock predictions in market history.
In their 1999 book "Dow 36,000," former Washington Post financial columnist James Glassman and economist Kevin Hassett famously forecast that stocks — which had begun to surge five years earlier as the internet boom gathered speed — would soon head into the stratosphere. Filled with the kind of populist prognostications that Wall Street pros generally avoid, the book urged average investors to climb aboard what the authors were certain would be an epic, and lucrative, run.
The rest, as they say, is history. The Dow crested around 11,500 in January 2000 and bounced around for the next 18 months before the dotcom crash and 9/11 caused stocks to swoon. In the ensuing decades, Glassman and Hassett were held up as a case study on the perils of predicting financial markets.
