Losers stand out in ‘08 financial mess

As 2008 ends, you may feel like the year’s biggest loser is you.

If you have a job, it probably feels shaky. If you have a 401(k), you can’t bear to open the statements. If you bought a house in the last five years, you feel like a sucker (unless you were the winning bidder at a foreclosure auction).

It’s cold comfort to know that the financial crash upended everyone.

High diesel prices as the year began ran independent truckers off the road. Soaring summer commodity costs choked businesses from bakeries to airlines. Frozen credit markets left small-business owners dialing their moms for loans.

Many of the biggest winners of the past lost their shirts in 2008.

The kings of Wall Street watched as their banks either disappeared through mergers or bankruptcy or received injections of tax dollars to stay alive. Investors who had trusted Bernard Madoff with $50 billion saw the money manager who had given them steady returns for decades admit it was all a Ponzi scheme.

The financial hurricane made the winners stand out even more.

Hedge fund manager John Paulson made billions by betting against the housing boom. Economist Nouriel Roubini and money manager Peter Schiff, who’d been laughed off as economic Cassandras, were proven right as their dire predictions came true, again and again. Despite conventional wisdom that the labor movement is near death, Boeing Co.’s machinists union flexed its muscle during an eight-week strike.

The year’s many losers and scant winners are below, listed by group:

LOSERS: Private-equity kings

Private equity champ Edward Lampert looked smart when he bought Kmart out of bankruptcy, then began selling off its real estate. Wall Street anticipated another success when he scooped up Sears. It hasn’t turned out that way. Sears Holdings Corp. lost $146 million in the most recent quarter, the stock is down about 60 percent for the year and the company is still searching for a chief executive, nearly a year after its last CEO resigned.

Likewise, real estate mogul Sam Zell burdened Tribune Co. with $13 billion in debt when he bought the company last year, leading it to file for bankruptcy in December. While he blamed the economy, employees and observers blamed him.

LOSERS: Pollyannas

Jerry Yang, Yahoo Inc.’s chief executive, kept waiting for Microsoft Corp. to offer a better price than $47.5 billion for Yahoo. It never happened. Instead, Yahoo’s stock sagged near five-year lows, making his refusal look less like an effort to get the best price for shareholders and more like excessive optimism. Yang said in November that he’d step down and Yahoo, in December, overhauled its severance plan in a move that would save a buyer somewhere between $462 million and $2.1 billion.

LOSERS: U.S. automakers

The CEOs of the Detroit Three went to Washington to beg for billions in bailout money. But it wasn’t on their hands and knees. As new-car sales cratered, the group flew private jets to D.C. in November to ask for billions in bailout money. Worse, they came without a plan. After they drove to Washington for a repeat visit, the Senate quashed a bailout, but the Bush administration approved a $17.4 billion rescue loan.

“Allowing the auto companies to collapse is not a responsible course of action,” Bush said.

WINNERS: Cassandras

As markets plummeted, the dourest economic observers gained respect.

Nouriel Roubini, a New York University economics professor, said in 2006 that the worst recession in four decades was on its way. He predicted that mortgage defaults would spread, investment banks would no longer exist in their current form and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would tumble.

Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, has been saying for years that the economy was built on too much consumption and not enough saving. “The disease is all this debt-financed consumption,” he said on a 2006 CNBC appearance. “The cure is that we stop consuming and start saving and producing again.”

Dean Baker, an economist the Center for Economic Policy and Research, has been tracking the housing bubble since 2002, when he published a paper titled, “The Run-up in Home Prices: Is it Real Or Is it Another Bubble?” His answer: Bubble.