KEY POINTS:
Unless my calendar is fast, 2008 should be just about over.
Good job too, it was starting to get nasty. It would be nice to consign all those crumbling markets, government guarantees and trillion-dollar bail-outs to memory.
But most people in the money business would prefer to forget the past 12 months altogether or pretend it never happened. I'm pretty sure all that bad stuff was real, though - check the internet for clarification.
The year has certainly wounded the industry I write about. You can see the financial advisory business facing its ING-induced demons on the Good Returns news site in the innocuously-titled post 'The difference between Hanover and ING' - the 60 comments are a record for the site.
The worst may very well be over, for markets at least. The catchphrase for 2009 is "cautious optimism" , according to an investment manager I spoke to today. Like everyone else, fund managers are picking up bargains at the (pre and post) Christmas sales.
"Maybe we should have waited a bit longer before buying though," the fund manager told me - next year things could be even cheaper.
But while financial markets rouse themselves from the dangerous pessimism of 2008, the rest of us are in for a pretty tough 12 months ahead, according to just about everybody. What do they know?
This list of the top 10 reads of the NZ Herald's 'Your views' columns shows what people are really thinking about - the biggest financial crisis in living memory doesn't rate. Most read subject: what's it really like living in Australia?
Is it 2009 yet?