The prospects for investors, be they corporate pensions, sovereign wealth funds, or individuals, appear bleak. John Authers, in Thursday’s FT, musters up the evidence (or at least the opinions) that bonds and stocks are both likely to deliver paltry returns for years to come. Sheelah Kolhatkar, in a cover story (and what a classy cover it is) in the new Bloomberg Businessweek, argues that the great alternative to plain-vanilla equity and debt investing — the hedge fund — is more or less over, too. And London Business School’s Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, and Mike Staunton, in a Credit Suisse report cited by Authers that’s a few months old but it is well worth downloading and taking the time to read, make a pretty convincing case that the equity and bond returns that came to be perceived in the U.S. as “normal” in the decades following World War II — and particularly since 1980 — are anything but.