Mutual Funds in 2009 is more worser than it was for 2008 since

agent's commission rates have been reduced from 3% to 1%.So it is only a

matter of hope it will change in 2010

Banks collapsed, markets crashed, housing prices tumbled amid a global recession, but the year held valuable lessons

http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/559398

Dec 30, 2008 04:30 AM
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David Olive
BUSINESS COLUMNIST

The past 12 months will be remembered as a gut-wrenching confluence of unlikely defining trends, almost all unpleasant: a puncturing of the housing bubbles in the U.S. and Western Europe; a paralyzing credit freeze among banks worldwide; an abrupt plunge in commodity and stock prices; global government bailouts of banking, auto and other sectors, and of consumers (through "stimulus packages"); and the re-emergence of unapologetic deficit spending to put an economic Humpty Dumpty back together again.

But the year is better understood as one of reckoning, of forced atonement for past sins. The industrialized world has long been living beyond its means, floating everything from unaffordable house purchases to highly leveraged corporate takeovers on a sea credit of unprecedented volume. When the tide of easy money that characterized most of the decade finally went out, crises long in the making suddenly emerged full-blown almost everywhere one looked.

The ceaseless reporting of crushing bad news – the U.S. housing collapse is killing our forest sector; the world's largest industrial enterprise, General Motors Corp., said in December it didn't have enough cash to make it to the end of the year – was so grim and unfathomable that it provoked comparisons with the Great Depression, when everything was falling apart and no one knew why. The meltdowns in various realms of the global economy often have no equal since the Dirty Thirties, to be sure. But they have unfolded with predictable logic, as naturally as the connections made in a child's join-the-dots puzzle.