December 2009 Comment:
Sporting fourfold gains since ringing in the year 2000, gold owners certainly enjoyed a relatively prosperous decade, but not everyone else passed the time as comfortably...

We can therefore fairly ponder whether Father Time (or, as Dickens would have it, The Ghost of the Financial Decade Past) as depicted here represents the beleaguered feelings of the typical Main Street investor, or perhaps rather it shows the contempt these particular investors feel for the lot of financial managers, investment bankers, and Ponzi schemers on Wall Street who did them all so very wrong.

As reported by Bloomberg: Investors who bought gold or commodities at the beginning of the decade should have tripled their money by the time the ball drops in New York's Times Square on Dec. 31. Stock holders will be poorer. A $100 investment in gold would now be more than $380 while the same sum in commodities would have grown to about $357... Stocks lost about 10 percent, including reinvested dividends. The chart below tells the story.

And, as if mere lackluster stock performance weren't enough to gall investors, The Associated Press reports the following: It was a rough year for Ponzi schemes. In 2009, the recession unraveled nearly four times as many of the investment scams as fell apart in 2008, with "Ponzi" becoming a buzzword again thanks to the collapse of Bernard Madoff's $50 billion plot. Tens of thousands of investors, some of them losing their life's savings, watched more than $16.5 billion disappear like smoke in 2009, according to an Associated Press analysis of scams in all 50 states... In all, more than 150 Ponzi schemes collapsed in 2009, compared to about 40 in 2008.