Like I said, it's structural. People that have no skills for the new economy will not be hired. Certain industries are fading and they will probably never return to their glory.
We are simply moving closer to the third-world countries with which we are competing.
Yet those free-trader types would have you believe otherwise and produce wild excuses for our current predicament.
As for your portfolio, you probably lost a lot for the same reason I did: a giant market bubble that inflated our assets beyond where they ever should have grown. I'll admit, I was once a fool for believing that my stocks could average 10% per year forever. It's no different than the fools who thought that housing prices could double in ten years and continue to climb.