The heat is oppressive on Wall Street and Main Street

By Dian Vujovich

It’s some kind of hot summer most of us living in the U.S. are going through. Too bad that heat hasn’t done much for Wall Street or Main Street other than make investors sweat.

Stocks didn’t have a hot second quarter. According to Lipper, the average U.S. equity fund was down 4.5 percent. Then again, one quarter doesn’t make a year or a month. In the month of June, for example, the average fund was up 3.1 percent, and for the past year down 1.76.

On the other hand, year-to-date, that same average fund is up over 7 percent.

If all of that feels a little mind scrambling, it is. It’s also reflective of market conditions here in the United States and around the globe.

Europe’s debt crisis isn’t going to be solved any time soon. The easiest way to understand that is simply to say that it takes time to get into debt, time for that debt to escalate into a debt problem, time for the problem to be identified, time for those trying to resolve the problem to come up with remedies, time for those resolutions to be put in place and then time for them to work.

You can apply that same it-takes-time scenario to the economic problems here in the U.S. whether they involve our nation’s debt, the unemployment rates and everything else you can think of.

The real estate market, for instance, is showing some steam but don’t look for prices to hit their bubble price anytime soon no matter who winds up in the White House in January 2013.

And speaking of the White House, below is a chart that looks at how the S&P 500 has performed during election years from 1928 through 2008. It’s from Ned Davis Research and T.Rowe Price.

So until money problems are solved around the world and at home, and our election year has passed, it looks like the best anyone can do is to sweat it out.