Jim Leng, the new Chairman of troubled mining giant Rio Tinto has quit abruptly despite having been employed by the company for only one month. This does not bode well as the company’s mountainous debt is at the core of why Leng is leaving the firm.

Bloomberg quotes Leng as saying “there has been a difference of opinion over which option the company should pursue.” Rio has “‘a financial issue to resolve in terms of its debt and repayment. I am hopeful that my resignation will enable the board to reach a consensual decision.”

This is the time of year when everyone tends to look back and sum up the year in one way or another. I have been doing much of the same.

In keeping with that theme, I have taken a good look through my nearly 1400 posts to get a better sense of what I got right and what I got wrong and how knowing that can help me going forward. Call it an exercise in intellectual honesty. This exercise has given me a good understanding of where things went wrong in the past year and why.

It may also give me some thoughts as to where we need to go in 2009. Let me share a little of what I learned with you. This is a long but thoughtful post, so take a few minutes. It should be worth it.

On the whole my predictive powers were working pretty well this year. But, I made a few lousy calls and some controversial ones along the way. Below is my view of how the year went, on some of those calls and links to the relevant posts. At the end, I’ll wrap it up with a few thoughts about where that leaves my thinking for 2009.

I am going to post a BBC article here that gives an anecdote about western Canada and how the boom in oil and commodities is causing economic problems there. Make of it what you will, but my bottom line is that Canada is neither immune from global pressures or from the commodities savaging. This type of thing will com to an end.

Just months ago, Rio Tinto was a behemoth swaggering from the huge run up in commodity prices. This is a company that had revenue of nearly $30 billion and net income of nearly $8 billion in 2007. It was worth over $160 billion by May as the commodities boom took shape.

They were everywhere: building projects in Saudi Arabia, resisting a takeover by BHP Billiton and operating across the globe. Most of that is history now, except for the debt.

You have probably never heard of Glencore. Well you have heard of its founder Marc Rich, the man infamously pardoned by President Clinton before he left office. And I suspect that you will soon hear a lot more about the company as well.

Glencore is a metals production and trading company based in Switzerland. It is one of the largest privately-owned companies in the world and a very large employer in Switzerland. The problem is that commodities prices have been absolutely decimated. So, the secretive Swiss company’s credit default swaps are trading at huge premiums, something we alluded to last month.

The obvious question is: why is that? Unfortunately, the answer is: nobody knows. But rumors of financial problems are mounting.

I caught a post today on the Swiss Blog Zeitenwende about Glencore, the Swiss corporate giant, which should reinforce the fact that this credit crisis is far from over. As the original post was in German, I have translated it into English below:
If Charts could speak, what would the following one tell us then? [...]

Last week, I posted an article on why the recent rally did not look anything like a bull market titled “An amazing market rally. What’s next?“o, it seems like I was bullish for all of two weeks. Yet, the truth is I was never bullish on the market as a whole. But, I [...]

For the second day in a row we are basking in the glow of an up market (update: or at least we were until the last 12 minutes). Everyone’s happy. But, some people are happier than others. And the happiest amongst the bunch are those people who are long commodities.

The markets are having a very bad day today. After we saw the Europeans were also vulnerable to this credit crisis, stock markets worldwide sold off, with many European markets seeing their largest drops since 1987. For Europe, today is as bad as last Monday’s 777 point fall was for the U.S.
Sectors being [...]

A few weeks ago, I said I thought the volatility in commodity and currency markets smelled like panic. I found it very hard to believe that we could have such violent moves without a significant shakeout in the hedge fund world. We are now beginning to see that shakeout.
Ospraie Fund has just collapsed, [...]