Barack Obama Saved America's Economy!

It's no surprise that Communist China calls 2009 "The Year of the Ox."

An Ox, after all, is some kind of Chinese variation of a regular bull -- and with last week's record-breaking week on Wall Street, there's no doubt that America's bull market is back.

Now that our usual U.S. prosperity has returned, Americans everywhere are giving a "high five" to President-Elect Barack Obama, the man who saved the economy. Just imagine what he'll do once he actually becomes the president!

Have you checked your 401k or IRA lately? I've sure been watching my retirement accounts, and they're all up 10% in the last 30 days alone. You may not be as experienced an investor, but simply tracking the nation's benchmark stock index would have earned you big bucks just since December 29: The S&P 500 rocketed up 6.8% just over the last week.

Even General Motors saw its stock prices soar on the first trading day of the wonderful new year, and struggling oil companies are finally seeing energy prices race up again.

Those jingle bells you hear aren't just the old Christmas decorations being thrown in the trash -- that's the sound of money!

Here's something fun to tell those Gloomy Guses who made their paper losses permanent by selling off their stocks and funds before Thanksgiving: The S&P 500 is up 23.8% just since November 20.

Think about it. If you had $100,000 in a basic fund that tracked the Standard & Poor's benchmark index, you would be up $23,800 today, just six weeks later. That's probably enough to buy your neighbor's foreclosed house from the mortgage company!

It might be kind of sad, watching your dumb ex-neighbors drive away for the last time in their six-miles-per-gallon soon-to-be-repossessed 2005 Chevy Tahoe with the Sarah Palin bumper sticker next to the plasti-chrome Jesus Fish, but Capitalism isn't always kind.

If Capitalism is too rough for you, however, I've heard about an island just 90 miles off the coast of Florida that is always looking for new communists to be enslaved by Fidel Castro.

Ken Layne is a senior investment manager at Ba'al & Anat LLC and editor-at-large for Wonkette, a biannual journal of economic chaos theory.