UPDATED: This posting now lists (mostly) finalized 2008 total returns information (interest and dividends included) from the listed stock indices. The final numbers won’t change much. 

“The best kept secret in the investing world: Almost nothing turns out as expected.”

– Harry Browne

Investors won’t be forgetting 2008 any time soon. Yet as bad as it was, the Permanent Portfolio survived intact with a profit for the year of about two percent.

The year included oil and other commodities going to record highs. Real estate prices fell at a rate not seen since the Great Depression. Century old banks that were leveraged to their eyeballs blew up and vanished. Iceland, a first-world country, went broke. Bernard Madoff, one of the founders of NASDAQ, admitted his hedge fund was a $50 Billion Ponzi Scheme. The Treasury Secretary and Fed Chairman openly talked about The End of The World As We Know It if we don’t “do something”. That “something” of course meant big bailouts for banks, irresponsible home buyers and automakers (and maybe more — to be continued).

By the time 2008 was over, the markets were down by one of the largest single year amounts since 1931.

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