It was a difficult year, 2009 – a year that will go down in U.S. economic history as one of the toughest.  The economy came perilously close to seizing up in a way that would have made the Great Depression look like primary school.  Heroic interventions by the Fed under Ben Bernanke and first Henry Paulson and then Tim Geithner at Treasury literally saved our economy.  The current high unemployment rate is a concern, of course, but the alternative was catastrophic.

2007 has not been a particularly memorable year, except perhaps if you are a Red Sox fan or the holder of a zero-down ARM.  The economy has managed a respectable showing in the face of a major melt-down in the sub-prime mortgage market, $100 dollar a barrel crude oil prices, and a precipitous decline in the dollar.  The American economy is a pretty miraculous thing.  It keeps on generating new jobs, in spite of market forces that would decimate most other economies in the world.

2006 will go down as a good year for business, the stock market, private equity firms, youTube, Bordeaux wine futures, Exxon-Mobil, and, improbably, the Saint Louis Cardinals. Faring not so well would be George W. Bush, the Amaranth Group of Hedge Funds, and the Boston Red Sox.

October 21st, 2005 was, of course, the 200th anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar. Trafalgar, you will remember, was where an English fleet led by Admiral Horatio Nelson demolished a larger French and Spanish force, thus dooming Napoleon's plan to cross the channel and invade England. The event was commemorated in grand style in England with a series of events, the highlight of which was a dinner on Nelson's flagship, HMS Victory, still on active service (in dry dock) in Plymouth.

T.S. Eliot once said "Humankind cannot bear very much reality". The year 2004 has tested all of us on the reality dimension.