Take a look at this chart of the S&P 500, and note the big dip starting in 2000 and repeating in 2008. If you happen to be an investor who went on that roller coaster ride both times, you can probably be forgiven for being too dizzy to delve into the obfuscatory world of 10-Qs, 10-Ks, and other byzantine company filings mandated by the SEC in the interest of transparency.

Unfortunately, however, that may be the only way these days to get the real scoop on a company’s financial health. Investor outsourcing of crucial due diligence to the media, stock analysts, and even the ratings agencies led to massive losses in the accounting scandals early last decade and in the financial collapse later on.

So when it comes to your money, how can you trust anyone but yourself?

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The web site footnoted.org received a lot of favorable press last year, including this report on Marketplace. The site delves into the arcane medium of company SEC filings, plucking out footnoted items that might serve as red flags to investors. Considering the grave business climate, the wholesale disappearance of jobs across the country, and the lack of transparency in investments that have contributed to massive losses by the public, this is a site worth following for not only those who put their money in anything riskier than a mattress, but also for anyone interested in the issue of soaring executive pay.

On New Year’s Eve, footnoted.org posted the results of its Worst Footnote of 2009 poll, as chosen by readers. Here are the winner and finalists.

Winner: Chesapeake Energy (CHK) spends $12.1 million to purchase Chairman and CEO Aubrey McClendon’s antique map collection

The proxy statement disclosure :

“In December 2008, the Company purchased an extensive collection of historical maps of the American Southwest from Mr. McClendon for $12.1 million, which represented his cost. A dealer who had assisted Mr. McClendon in acquiring this collection over a period of six years advised the Company that the replacement value of the collection in December 2008 exceeded the purchase price by more than $8 million. The maps have been displayed at the Company’s Oklahoma City headquarters for a number of years, during which the Company has been insuring the maps in exchange for their display. Our corporate headquarters in Oklahoma City is comprised of numerous buildings in a campus-type setting. These maps have been displayed throughout the Company’s headquarters for a number of years, complementing the interior design features of our campus buildings and contributing to our workplace culture. Our employees and visitors appreciate the maps’ depiction of the early years of the nation’s energy industry and the discovery and expansion of Indian Territory (now, Oklahoma) and the surrounding territories of the early United States. In addition, the collection connects to our Company’s everyday use of mapping in our business of exploring for and developing natural gas and oil. The Company was interested in continuing to have use of the map collection and believed it was not appropriate to continue to rely on cost-free loans of artwork from Mr. McClendon. The Board of Directors authorized the purchase of Mr. McClendon’s collection following review and approval by the Audit Committee and required that the Company’s purchase price be applied as a credit to Mr. McClendon’s future FWPP costs. Future purchases, if any, of historical maps or artwork for the Company’s headquarters will be made directly by the Company.”

This particular disclosure got a lot of exposure this year after we wrote about it and even prompted Chesapeake to issue a amended proxy a few days later to provide additional details on the maps and other goodies the McClendon received.

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When I was a kid, 2010 sounded like a year beyond science fiction, a time when anything might be possible. But now that that impossibly futuristic date has finally made its way to the front of the line, all I can think of is my disappointment in the lack of flying cars.

One thing that never occurred to me in those decades leading up to the latter part of the Big Zeros is that America would experience an economic crisis so profound as to spawn a blog like this. If you had told me, say, 25 years ago that one day I’d be blogging about a near-depression, I would have said “No way!” (I wasn’t so articulate back then.) Then I would have said, “What’s a blog?”

But anyway, here we are…

One item to catch up with and expand on. During Christmas week, EconomyStory wrote about Laredo Reads, a campaign to bring a new bookstore to the Texas border city that is losing its only bookstore, a B. Dalton, this year. Book sales, like sales of many things, were down in 2009, and the growing acceptance of e-books only added to retailers’ woes.

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Our most clicked-on photos of the year.

Click on an image to see it full size.

More photos here.

What a year it’s been at EconomyBeat. Lay-offs, health-care trauma, long-term unemployment…honestly, this is not the kind of blog you want to see go on forever. One can only hope that its very premise — documenting the copious material online borne of massive economic dislocation and an historic financial crisis — becomes irrelevant sooner rather than later.

But until then, we carry on…

Our top posts for the year:

(15) CEO pay vs. minimum wage – How many minimum wage earners does it take to equal the salaries of the top eight corporate chief executives in 2008? This infographic illustrates.

(14) Google job interview cheat sheet – what they ask you at the Big G before they give you the key to the washroom

(13) Not an Onion headline – “Toronto Star copyeditor edits memo announcing elimination of copyeditor jobs”

(12) Market psychology + narcissism + sex drive = flannel shirts? – reverse engineering the roots of trends

(11) Sometimes, it just takes a single index card – sardonic visualizations of economic and other relationships

(10) Inappropriate comment of the day – An unemployed woman responds to her father’s comment that “she doesn’t want to work.”

(9) There, I Fixed It - “epic kludges and jury rigs”

(8) Who are the worst tippers? – Waiters and waitresses respond.

(7) EconomyBeat podcast: Local currency bucks the dollar – Some towns issue their own currency to encourage local spending, and it’s legal.

(6) Best of Craiglist: Economy version – particularly interesting and/or humorous user posts as indicators of the horrendous economy

(5) Repaired Things – The blog – gluing, taping, sewing, propping, and even peanut buttering broken stuff

(4) Merry Recession! – recession-themed Christmas cards

(3) Friday photo gallery – images from the Great Recession

(2) Health care reform explained – on the back of a napkin – the whole shebang in simple slide format

(1) Geography of a recession – animated map of unemployment rates by county from January 2007 to the present. As the map turns from lighter (more employed) to darker (less), you get a good sense of the economy’s deterioration.

Occasionally I’ll post something that I think people will be really interested in that falls flat. Here’s my personal list of stuff I thought was really interesting but for some reason failed to capture your attention. Click now or forever hold your peace…

• Public Option – The Musical – guerilla musical theater from Billionaires for Wealthcare
• Advice From the Homeless Guy – trenchant first-person account of the homeless life
• Rappin’ economics – rap song describes 10 economic principles in a style somewhat reminiscent of Eminem
• Laid-Off: A web cartoon – jobless dude stares at the wall, eats fudge dried cookies, and take an impromptu three-hour nap
• Laughing through lay-offs – catalogue of corporate job cuts annotated with sarcastic comments.
• “Don’t call it a family” – profound if bitter denunciation of what one man sees as hyprocrisy in the advertising industry
• When the Yes Men strike – political satirists pull of a hoax U.S. Chamber of Commerce press conference. Almost.
• Auto-Tuning the News – if you haven’t seen it yet, and even if you have, quite brilliant
• Smigly: The Stimulus Package – animated web cartoon is about a concise a critique of late-2000s America as you’ll find
• Laugh your way through the recession – financial-crisis comedy
• Health-care horror stories – actually I’m not too surprised as to why people didn’t flock to read these. Very scary stuff.
• “And the Lord said…” – a look at the Conservative Bible Project
• From the heart of the bubble…in 1999 – annotated front page of the Wall Street Journal the first time the Dow broke 10,000
• U.S. Chamber of Commerce, then and now – Short and melodramatic animated Chamber film from 1954 features the same anti-government, anti-tax rhetoric you hear today.
• Dramatic video from UCLA protests – University of California student protest over a huge fee hike turns ugly.
• Recession blues – 10 YouTube performances all titled “Recession Blues”

“If you had $10,000 and put it in the S&P 500 at the start of the decade you would have performed worse than a person who merely stuffed the money into a mattress.”

Chalk up another one for the abysmal 2000s. This decade proved to be the worst for U.S. stocks. Ever. From last week’s Wall Street Journal:

The rest of the article is filled with alarming statistics. Let’s go to the blogs, shall we?

From The Big Picture:

But despite what many fools and asshats were claiming in the 1990s, stocks can only gain so much relative to earnings. Sure, other factors like population growth, economic expansion, productivity gains, all matter on the margins, but the bottom line is Earnings. But over the long haul, there is only so far you can run ahead of historical median rates of return.

The current horrific decade lost half a percent each year on average versus average annual returns of about 10-12% over the past century. Why? This under-performance is payback for the massive gains in the salad days of the late 1990s. As the table at right shows, the gains were far above median.

There is only so far you can deviate from the historical mathematical norm before mean reversion rears its ugly head…

Repeat after me: There is no free lunch. A decade of out-performance will be paid back one way or another.

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Two views of the Senate health care bill from the left. First, Darcy Burner of the American Progressive Caucus Policy Foundation on the blog Open Left, who writes a post called “Joe Lieberman’s Healthcare Bill Is Worse Than Nothing. Kill It.” The post was written after Joe Lieberman forced the Democrats to drop an option for the uninsured to buy into Medicare at age 55.

Then, from statistician Nate Silver on his blog FiveThirtyEight, with a post called “Why Progressives are Batshit Crazy to Oppose the Senate Bill.”

First, Darcy Burner on Open Left:

The fundamental failing of the newest Senate proposal is that it requires individuals to purchase health insurance, but does nothing to rein in what insurance companies charge. There is nothing to stop spiraling health costs from eating up an ever-increasing percentage of our national productivity.

The House bill has two major cost-control mechanisms: the public option and the 85% medical-loss ratio requirement. The Senate bill is on track to have neither, and nothing new to replace them. The Senate bill is a recipe for national disaster. If it’s that bill or nothing, I prefer nothing…

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For good or for ill, the Senate got ‘er done. With all the hubub over the removed public option, the failed Medicare buy-in gambit, and restrictions on subsidies for insurers who provide abortion coverage, a very important part of the bill has been lost in the shuffle:

The tanning tax.

After the nip-and-tuck lobby complained about a tax on cosmetic procedures that Harry Reid had inserted into the bill (the “Bo-tax”), he took it out and replaced it with a 10% tax on tanning salons.

If the tanning industry wants to kill the tax in the House-Senate conference, they’ll probably need more of a campaign than this Indoor Tanning Association‘s online call-to-action, which has a circa-1997 look-and-feel to it.

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Click on an image to see it full size.

More photos here.