A bad year…and 2009 doesn’t look much better…the worldwide financial crunch is affecting everyone… 2008 will go down as the worst year for investors of all time…who needs Smoot or Hawley? Friedman has let us down…Keynesianism causes more problems than it solves…and more!

“What an awful year. And 2009 doesn’t look like it’s going to be any better.”

Our neighbor, Pierre, was describing the state of the agricultural industry in Europe…and, indirectly, why he couldn’t pay the rent. He leases some land from us at a price of about $150 per acre. He’s now far behind on his rent payments. Elizabeth had asked for a meeting to try to collect. Your editor sat off to the side, listening.

“Of course, I’d like to pay,” Pierre explained. “And I’m sorry I’m so far behind. But this is just a terrible time for us. I have to feed the cows. That’s the first priority. I

In the currency market, the dollar got slammed against the euro for a second straight day. Late Thursday, the euro was trading at $1.3314 vs. $1.3016 on Wednesday.

The day’s tone was set by a litany of horrible data, beginning with the Labor Department’s report that the number of first-time filings for state unemployment benefits jumped by 58,000, to a 26-year high of 573,000, last week.

Separately, Labor said that the prices of goods and services imported into the United States fell a record 6.7% in November.

And the Commerce Department said that the nation’s trade deficit widened 1.1% to $57.2 billion from $56.6 billion in September, vs. economists’ expectations for the deficit to narrow to $54.5 billion.

On the plus side, the Fed reported that the nation’s households paid down debts in the third quarter, for the first time since at least 1952. Households also paid off more mortgage debt than