A column in the Sunday business section by Jeff Sommer, who "also edits business news" and previously was a national editor at the Times, reports:
Vanguard, for instance, projects that the U.S. stock market will produce annualized returns of only 2.4 to 4.4 percent for the next decade, in no small part because prices are so high.
Other world stock markets haven't risen as much lately, and, partly for that reason, Vanguard expects that they will outpace the U.S. market by almost three percentage points, annualized, in the decade ahead. That's a reminder that a truly diversified stock portfolio is a multinational one, containing shares from all major public stock markets (including those in China).
This pretty much says it all about the modern New York Times—it wants readers to divest from and boycott Israel, but to invest in China, where as recently as July 26, 2021 the U.S. State Department was describing an "ongoing genocide." ("Ongoing" genocide, by the way, is the worst kind.)
The online version of the Times column carries a hyperlink to a previous Sommer column that discusses China in more detail, averring, "I think the benefits of putting some of your money into Chinese stocks and bonds are more compelling than the reasons for staying away," and explaining, "I've come to accept that I'm a die-hard globalist."
Sommer passes along the Vanguard projections as if they are valid, without doing any checking to see if previous Vanguard predictions about returns of U.S. stocks are accurate. For example, in March 2012 Vanguard advised allocating between 20% to 40% to international equities. That would have been not great advice to take: the pre-tax average annual return return for the past ten years on a Vanguard International Stock Index Fund was in the 7 percent to 8 percent range, while the return for a U.S. Total Stock Market Index Fund has been more like 16 percent to 17 percent annually over the same period. If you invested $10,000 at the start of the decade in the U.S. fund, you'd have about $44,000, while if you invested in the international fund, you'd have about $20,000. Taking Vanguard's advice on that would have cost you $24,000.
And it's not only international stocks on which Vanguard's advice has been flawed. A December 2018 "Market Outlook" from Vanguard said "our expected return outlook for U.S. equities over the next decade is centered in the 3%–5% range, in stark contrast with the 10.6% annualized return generated over the last 30 years." It also said, "From a U.S. investor's perspective, the expected return outlook for non-U.S. equity markets is in the 6%–8% range, modestly higher than that of U.S. equity." Again, that expectation has so far been laughably wrong; the three-year return on the International index has been roughly 8 to 12 percent annually (depending on whether you take September 30 or October 31 as the end), while the U.S. three-year return has been more like 16 to 22 percent annually (again, depending on your end period). Why would anyone make a personal financial decision on the basis of these projections? A good Times personal finance column, rather than parroting projections from big Times advertisers or advising readers to invest in countries where the U.S. government says there is an ongoing genocide, would be to go back and look back at some of these annual projections issued by investment firms and see how they hold up to what actually happened.