It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
Erin is a member of The Motley Fool Blog Network -- entries represent the personal opinions of our bloggers and are not formally edited.
It was the best of times, it was the worst times, and we wondered if it could get much worse.
The Big Banks failed, one by one, Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C) (-47%), Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) (gulp, -60%), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) and Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) (45%), even other brother Morgan, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co (NYSE: JPM) (-30%).
The S&P 500 reached an all-time high, and then it didn't. The broader S&P 500 and their financial cousins began to take different paths. No longer trusting the banks, the money went other places. Bank profitability suffered, but technology, food, and other industries gained.
The common man got tired of the Big Banks calling the shots, and foreclosing unfairly on homes, began to sue the Federal Housing Administration. And a few brave lawsuits came forth claiming that mortgage securities were built to fail. The common man stood up and sent his unemployed younger brothers and sisters to Occupy Wall Street.
But then something good started to happen again, and the economy began to move toward recovery. The common man got a job, and unemployment fell to 8.6%, and had money to go spend. Retail sales went up, and home prices stopped scaring people.
Across the pond, Europe began to scare the Dollar. Greece, Finland, Norway, Germany, France, and Brtain all dropped. Not to mention Japan and Hong Kong on the other side of the world. But this was one time where misery did not love having so much company.
Suddenly an AA+ wasn't so bad after all. (Unless you have a Tiger Mother.)
Just when we thought things couldn't get much worse, we started to realize that the CEOs of some of the most respected companies we patronize and investing in, did not have the customer's, or the common man's, best interest at heart. Tallying a few of them up, we found Research in Motion's (NASDAQ: RIMM) Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, William C. Weldon at Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), Hewlett Packard's (NYSE: HPQ) Leo Apotheker, Bank of America's Brian Moynihan, and a few other guys on Santa's naughty list. (Be sure to check out "This is When to Worry About Your CEO" by Matt Koppnheffer.)
(Reed Hastings of Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) almost made this list, but saved himself by cutting his own salary recently, as compared to the jerk CEOs who took home millions in bonuses while their companies (and customers) suffered. I like a CEO that can admit when he's wrong.)
So where were the good times? They were had by the common man, who in spite of all that worked against him this year, pulled himself up by his bootstraps and survived. He stood up for himself. He complained, he Occupied, he closed his Bank of America accounts, and he bought his Christmas presents on layaway instead of credit cards. And that is why 2012 is going to be a better year. Because the common man survived. The common man figured out how to take care of himself, and not be a victim anymore.
Erin McBride does not own shares of any of the companies listed above.
She writes regularly about politics at Swing State Voter (http://swingstatevoter.blogspot.com)
