It’s the last day I’ll be spending at the office this year. Always a funny feeling. Another year is gone. A new calendar must be cracked open. I feel like I should clean up, but there’s really nothing to get rid of. One day I guess I’ll leave this place for real, and perhaps it will feel a little bit like this, only moreso. This time around, I’m luckier than some. I get to come back and see how things work out for another cycle.
I won’t say a lot about 2008. I suppose there were many good things about it, although it’s hard to remember them now, what with all the Spitzers and Blagojeviches and Madoffs and Greenspans and Paulsons and Bernankes and assorted Wall Street miscreants, the bailouts and the purges and the blown hedges and wilted WaMus and all that. The list of losers grows so long that it’s hard to remember who we were mad at last month, last week, yesterday.
You kind of want to hope that 2009 will be different, and maybe it will be. We’ll have a new president. The markets will have to return to some kind of normalcy after a long period of disease. Like, creditors will have to start giving people credit again at some point, right? The debt folks will have to do what they do for a living, more responsibly, we hope. Car makers will have to figure out a way to sell some cars, which probably means somebody will start advertising again. Life will find a way.
The general feeling I get is that we’re all pretty glad to get out of 2008 with at least a portion of our skins on. Nobody I know is sad to see the old year go. That twinkle in the common eye might not be tears of sadness or rage. It might be a glimmer of hope.
Thanks to all of you who come here to browse, get excited, feel outrage or occasional amusement. I love to read what you write. I am very happy to publish the lot of you, as long as you keep it relatively clean and marginally on-point. One thing I do know about the year to come. I look forward to hanging with all of you as we chew over – and occasionally spit out – the events of this world as they unfold.
Now I guess I’ll just lock up and get out of here. I’ll see you when I see you, guys.