For years I’ve been saying that Wall Street’s a big loser, that investing in stocks the past decade meant you lost big-time, yes, over 40% of your retirement portfolio, even more after adjusting for inflation. Here’s the latest on how badly inflation is eating away at your golden years, thanks to E.S. Browning’s great reporting in Wall Street Journal’s “Adjusted for Inflation, Bad Run Looks Worse:”

“Many investors realize stocks have been among the worst investments of the past decade. But they may not realize quite how bad the decade was because most forget about the effects of inflation. Despite its 2009 rebound, the Dow Jones Industrial Average today stands at just 10520.10, no higher than in 1999. And that is without counting consumer-price inflation. In 1999 dollars, the Dow is only at about 8200 and would have to rise another 28% or so to return to 1999 levels. Using today’s dollars and starting at 10520.10, the Dow would have to surpass 13460 to get back to its 1999 level in real, inflation-adjusted terms.

“Controlling for inflation takes extra work and makes stock gains look punier, so it is easy to see why stock analysts almost never do it. The media almost never do it either. But other things do get measured in real dollars. When economists report whether the economy is growing, they account for inflation. When analysts judge long-term gains in commodities such as gold or oil, they often adjust for inflation, noting that gold hit a record this month in nominal terms but remains far from its 1980 record in real terms. Because analysts almost never do the same with stocks, it leaves investors with an exaggerated view of their portfolios’ performance over time.

So you can bet you’ll hear more and more investors screaming about gold. Across the world, not just here in America. And not just buying and hoarding that heavy clumbersome metal. How about returning to the gold standard of measuing value? Yes, unwinding the mistake Nixon made when he took America off gold. Here are some ideas from Browning in The Journal:  

Lately, some investors have gotten interested in measuring the Dow in gold rather than dollars. Gold has rebounded since 1999, and the fascination with the yellow metal has made investors start thinking of it again as a currency. Ned Davis, the founder of Ned Davis Research, referred to gold as “real money” in a recent report and published charts of bonds, home prices and stocks measured in gold rather than dollars. Even with gold’s swoon in recent days, the Dow looks a lot weaker over the past decade measured in gold than in dollars.

Of course, it is possible to find a hot investment that dwarfs the Dow’s gains over any period, which makes many analysts question the value of adjusting the Dow for gold’s gains. Such skepticism doesn’t stop gold’s supporters from pointing out how much weaker the Dow looks when measured in ‘hard’ money. In 1997, the Dow looked strong at 40 times the dollar value of an ounce of gold, notes John Hathaway, who oversees the Tocqueville Gold Fund at New York’s Tocqueville Asset Management. With gold’s rebound since 1999, the Dow now is worth about nine times an ounce of gold, meaning simply gold has performed a lot better than the Dow.

Gold a better investment than the good ol’ American Dollar? And what if it stays up there forever, unlike it did in the 1980′s? Scary isn’t it. As Dorothy would say: “Toto, I don’t think we’re not in Kansas anymore,” nor is the new capitalism.