From The Business Insider, Dec. 29, 2009:

While U.S. equity markets are doing superb since the March rally began, we've undergone tough times in this past decade.

Two bubbles, near-systemic collapse, and a credit crunch have really taken their toll upon our economy.

Hence, as we examine the world's best performing equity markets over the last 10 years, we find that no U.S. or Western-European-based exchange can be found.

Instead, Russia, China, and Eastern  European nations take the cake.

Imagine getting a 900% return on your investment by plunking down a few thousand on an emerging markets index fund or ETF. You'd be ecstatic.

Click here to view the world's best performing markets.

More coverage from The Business Insider:

• Ten brands that will disappear in 2010
• Stock-market doomsayers who won't give up

Stocks sure didn't start the year on the right foot, tumbling into early March amid the ongoing fallout from the September 2008 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and fears of bank nationalizations. But from the depths of the March lows, major averages mounted a historic and pretty much unrelenting rally.

In the past 12 months, the Dow and S&P are each up more than 20% while the Nasdaq is up more than 40%.

Hindsight being 20-20, the bears were wrong for two major reasons, as Henry and I discuss in the accompanying clip...

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Rewind to Inauguration Day in January. President-elect Obama ushered in a new administration with much fanfare and hope for C-H-A-N-G-E. Now 12 months later, it's business as usual. Take a trip down memory lane as we recall some of the highlights (and lowlights) of 2009 in the accompanying clip. 

We have a problem with that!  Enormous bonus payouts for executives. Toxic, dangerous assets that remain on banks' balance sheets. The same executives running firms they took to the brink with risky investment choices. The "too big to fail" institutions took the global economy to the precipice -- but were saved with hefty rescue packages thanks to American taxpayers -- are now bigger than ever.

As summarized by one of our most popular Tech Ticker guests Howard Davidowitz, "I have a problem with that!" So do many Americans as populist outrage rises.

In fact, it's anything but business as usual for American workers who are grappling with 10% unemployment -- the highest level in 26 years -- and no guarantee the economic bottom is in place for 2010. 

While the $787 billion stimulus package has yet to filter down to local communities, it's no wonder Americans are asking: "Where's MY bailout?"...

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America continues to crawl out of recession. The U.S. economy is growing at a snails pace, 2.2% annually, while China's emerging economy is expected to grow at 8% (if you believe their government figures.)

The difference is perhaps best exemplified when comparing America's gaming paradise, Las Vegas, to China's in Macau. Room rates in Vegas remain cheap and the new mega complex, CityCenter is already offering deals to lure high-end tourists, as detailed here.

Meanwhile, Macau casino revenues rose 59% in November. In fact, their biggest problem is too much growth, says Macquarie Securities gaming analyst Joel Simkins. "In the past when Macau has seen this dramatic growth, generally speaking, Beijing has stepped in and applied a brake to the accelerator" by limiting tourist visits.

The market is so hot, most of the big U.S. casino operators are betting billions on Macau. Las Vegas Sands and Wynn Resorts recently listed their Macau businesses on the nearby Hong Kong stock exchange. Sands China has the second biggest market share there and expect revenues to top $5 billion next year.

In many ways, Macau looks a lot like Las Vegas, except it's more crowded and pollution often blocks the sun. "If you drop someone from the U.S. into Macau you wouldn't feel a whole lot different," notes Simkins.

From The Business Insider, Dec. 24, 2009:

The New York Times delivers a front-page expose on the original Goldman Sachs scandal: How the firm created derivatives (synthetic CDOs) to allow investors to bet on the housing market, sold the CDOs to clients who wanted to bet on additional housing market gains, and then went short the same CDOs because Goldman believed the housing market would crash.

The outcome, of course, was the same as it usually is: Goldman made a killing, on both the product origination fees and the proprietary bets.  Goldman's clients, meanwhile, got crushed.

One observer likens this to buying insurance on a house and then burning the house down:

“The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. “When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”

But is it really a scandal?

If you view Wall Street the old-fashioned way, yes: The firm sold its clients a product and then bet against it.  This allowed Goldman to make money two ways instead of just one: Product origination fees and trading profits, all at its clients' expense.

If you take a more realistic view of Wall Street, however, this is just an everyday reality.  Wall Street firms like Goldman sit between buyers and sellers, and they also buy and sell on their own behalf.  Every single transaction these firms conduct entails a conflict of interest: Everyone is always making bets, and someone is always winning and losing them.  It's just not obvious until later which party that is.

The way we suspect Goldman viewed its behavior in the housing scenario above is as follows:

• Clients are desperate for products with which to bet on the housing market

• We can help our clients by creating those products and get paid handsomely for doing so. 

• We're negative on the housing market, so we can use the products bet against the housing market.  If we're right, we'll make some money there, too.

Don't forget that the buyers of Goldman's CDOs were among the most sophisticated investors in the world.  These investors were paid to analyze the housing market and make smart investment decisions based on that analysis.  The investors did their analysis and concluded that the housing market was going to go up.  Goldman did its own analysis and came to the opposite conclusion.  But it was at least relatively a fair fight. ...

Click here for the full post.

More coverage from The Business Insider:

• Goldman blasts the NYTimes hit-job
• How Goldman screwed its clients in the housing collapse

For savvy investors, shorting the dollar and being long commodities proved to be smart strategy for most of the decade. But is this party ending as the aughts give way to the 2010s?

Commodity prices will move sideways next year, forecasts Nariman Behravesh, chief economist for IHS Global Insight. "The markets have gotten a little ahead of themselves" and prices have retreated. "But they're not going to collapse because there's still some underlying demand there," he tells Aaron and Henry.

Outlook for oil prices. For the beginning of 2010, Behravesh expects softening commodity prices, including oil. He sees crude trading in the $65/barrel range. Oil recently was trading around $76/barrel, down from $80/barrel this fall. (Oil prices had tumbled to as low as $33/barrel a year ago.) Prices should tick up as the global economy gains momentum in the second half of the year.

Go for gold and the dollar? Seemingly everyone's favorite commodity gold has also been falling, retreating recently to November lows. Behravesh thinks gold will follow the same pattern as oil...

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President Obama will be meeting with some community bankers at the White House today.  As he did last week in his meeting with Wall Street's kingpins, the President will undoubtedly encourage the community bankers to lend more.

But first, he has some explaining to do: Specifically, why the government is doing everything it can to save Wall Street but is allowing smaller banks to fail--a double-standard that is presumably forefront in the mind of most community bankers.

Beyond that elephant in the room, the meeting will be a brainstorming session designed to figure out how to persuade the banks to start lending to small businesses again.

Part of the problem is that loan demand is down.  Part of the problem is that the banks are still preserving capital to protect against losses from old loans.  And part of it is that banks can currently make enormous profits from lending risk-free to the government, so there's little incentive to take on additional risk.

The real answer of what to do about it is likely "be patient."  Our debt problem took two decades to build.  We can't "deleverage" back to normal overnight.

See Also: Consumer Debt Burden Less Crushing Than It Was A Year Ago