As stated earlier I am normally a very positive person - perhaps the eternal optimist. I always try to salvage good out of any misfortune, knowing full well that this is how we all learn - even from childhood. This process never stops for most of us - even until death itself!

The following article, if true, is deeply disturing. It brings to the surface how millions of people have been manipulated & become gullible over the last decade - one that will go down in history for many reasons - some good others not so good. Some unethical politicians & investments firms clearly have not put the greater good & interests of the public they serve first - many of us have trusted them but now increasingly we question their motives. I invite your comments as we enter this Holiday Season full of reflection. Wishing everyone only the best both now & in the New Year!

The Men of the Broken Decade

Since 1999, Time magazine has ignorantly lauded the blunders of Fed chiefs and their clueless cohorts. No wonder it named Ben Bernanke its Person of the Year.

[Related content: recession, financial crisis, Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, Bill Fleckenstein

By Bill Fleckenstein

MSN Money

As this will be my last column before the decade ends, and given that Time magazine has chosen to anoint Ben Bernanke as its Person of the Year, I thought I would share my opinion on the subject.

First of all, Bernanke's selection is an intriguing bookend to the Fed's decade. A little more than 10 years ago, in February 1999, his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, appeared on Time's cover as a member of "The Committee to Save the World."

With Greenspan were Robert Rubin -- another financial operator who seemed to have little actual understanding of the financial system, as he was paid tens of millions of dollars to help preside over Citigroup's (C, news, msgs) destruction -- and Larry Summers, then deputy Treasury secretary and now a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama. That 1999 cover focused on the way these men led America's economy and, by extension, the world's economy through the fallout of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund fiasco of late 1998.

Of course, the eventual trouble precipitated by the anything-goes mentality then brewing in the wild and crazy banking system -- and by the failure to realize that speculation run amok can threaten the financial system -- caused Greenspan to behave as he did.

His actions and words fomented the stock mania that followed. That mania sent stock prices high enough such that now, a decade later, the market has generated a total return, including dividends, just shy of minus 10% -- the worst decade for stocks in the past 100 years. For perspective, the 1930s yielded a modest loss of about 0.3%.