In December 1912, the following testimony was given by John Pierpoint Morgan to the Pujo Committee, a sub-committee of the US House Banking and Currency Committee, which had launched an investigation into allegations that national financial and banking power had been concentrated in the hands of a few individuals:

Morgan: "The question of control, in this country at least, is personal; that is, in money."

Counsel: "How about credit?"

Morgan: "In credit, too."

Counsel: "Is not credit based primarily upon money or property?"

Morgan: "No, sir, the first thing is character."

Counsel: "Before money or property?

Morgan: "Before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it."

The JP Morgan who gave this testimony was the iconic banking scion and founder of today's JP Morgan Chase. The quintessential relevance of his testimony lies in the words "The first thing is character... Money cannot buy it."

One hundred years later, character - or the lack of it - was the central parallel between the scandals and turmoil at both the beginning and the end of the so-called Noughties decade.

In 2002 it was Kenneth Lay, founder and CEO of Enron, which had gone from nowhere to number five in the Fortune 500, and Bernard Ebbers, CEO of WorldCom - the US telecoms group that then epitomised the fast growing corporation of the late 1990s. The Enron scandal erupted when it was revealed that its reported financial condition was sustained substantially by institutionalised, systematic, and creatively planned accounting fraud.

The latter filed for bankruptcy in July 2002, amid revelations that it hid net earnings targets for years by burying billions of dollars in ordinary expenses in its capital expenditure budgets.

The scandals destroyed the Arthur Andersen accounting firm which had been auditor to both companies.

We may have forgotten now, in the light of the end of decade turmoil, how investor confidence in the US had been shot to pieces because investors did not believe the earnings numbers published by corporations.

But we do remember more recent names that represent the antithesis of character, such as Bernard Madoff and a multitude of Wall Street sharks who packaged and distributed pools of worthless mortgage-related investment products branded with an alphabet soup of acronyms.

Does history repeat itself? It certainly seems to - both in terms of character (and characters!), and in terms of stock market crashes - and rebounds.

The financial crisis of the Noughties decade has been constantly referred to as the worst since the 1930s Depression. Even then, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his inauguration speech, blamed the 1930s crisis on the greed of bankers and financiers.

However, similar financial storms first struck in the 1900s - the first "Noughties". The Panic of 1907 saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average collapse from a then all-time high of 103 registered on January 19, 1906, to 53 in the 22 months to November 1907 - a drop of 48.5 per cent from peak to trough. The rebound to 99, by the end of 1909, meant a gain of 86.8 per cent in the following 14-month bull market. It is relevant to note that the panic of 1907 eventually led to the appointment of the above mentioned 1912 Pujo Committee and, in turn, the establishment of the US Federal Reserve Bank in 1913.

At the start of the first year of the second decade of the third millennium, it could prove worthwhile to review the just concluded first decade, which has now been confirmed as the second worst in stock market history as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

The Dow is still the weathervane of the US - and therefore, the world's - stock markets. Its worst decade was the turbulent 1930s. The Thirties and the Noughties, or 00s, are the only two decades ever to end in negative territory.

The Dow started the 1930s with an attempted climb back from the Wall Street crash of October 1929, which saw that decade close at the level of 248 from a pre-crash all time high of 381 on September 3. The decade of the Great Depression saw the Dow end at the 150 level - a grinding 39.5 per cent mauling after a full 10 years.

The Noughties saw the Dow decline a comparatively mild 9.3 per cent from 11,497 to last Thursday's end-of-year 10,428 close. It is small consolation for investors, but it does highlight the massive difference to the oft compared 1930s decade of disaster.

Let's remove the mists of time that shroud the 1930s. Upon closer examination it is testament to the belief that every adversity carries within it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.

In the first two and a half months of 1930, the Dow climbed 20 per cent, to a high of 294 by April 17. Then, in less than 27 months, on July 8, 1932, it had plummeted a heart-stopping 86 per cent to 41.22, seemingly surviving on a life support system. As banks failed across the country, and unemployment soared to 25 per cent, confidence in financial markets understandably melted like an ice cube in the desert sun.

Yet the November 1932 Presidential election victory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was to have a galvanising effect from the time he took his oath of office on March 4, 1933. (Inauguration day was subsequently brought forward to January 20).

FDR's first initiative under his "New Deal" was to declare a banking holiday so as to cool the rush on the banks, and close Wall Street for 12 days. The Gold Standard was scrapped. By June, the Glass Steagall Act (the Banking Act of 1933) became law. It created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and effectively divorced commercial banking from investment banking.

In 1934 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was set up to regulate Wall Street. Parenthetically, this was chaired by Joseph P. Kennedy, who reputedly sold out before the stock market crash - when even the shoeshine boy started giving him unsolicited advice about the stock market! Kennedy had been FDR's 1932 campaign fund raiser, and was the patriarch of the Kennedy dynasty. The Social Security Act followed in 1935.

The stock market obviously warmed to FDR's "nothing to fear but fear itself" leadership. When the market re-opened on March 15, 1933, the Dow recorded a gain of 15.34 per cent - the best ever one-day record.

The Dow Jones rose for each of the years from 1933 to 1936, with consecutive gains of 66.7 per cent, four per cent, 38.5 per cent and 25 per cent. This equates to an astronomical 200 per cent gain in the four years from end 1932 to end 1936. The market gain is an even more impressive 257 per cent over four years, if read from the Dow's close of 54 on March 3, 1933 (the eve of FDR's inauguration) to the March 3, 1937 close of 193. And that's at the height of the Great Depression decade!

Very few courageous souls dared to venture into the stock market on July 8, 1932. Yet anyone who invested in the 30 stocks which were then the components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average saw the market rise a stratospheric 373 per cent - as the Dow skyrocketed from 41 to a decade high of 194 less than five years later, on March 5, 1937.

Let's fast forward to the Noughties, a decade which kicked off with Bill Clinton's last year in office. On November 12, 1999 he had signed the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act.

This was of extreme relevance to what would happen less than a decade later in the notorious Noughties. Why? Because the repeal enabled commercial banks, as distinct from investment banks, such as Citigroup (which in 1999 was the largest US bank by assets) to underwrite and trade instruments such as mortgaged-backed securities (MBS) and collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), besides establishing so-called structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, that bought these securities. So were the seeds of the near financial meltdown, sown by Clinton for Obama to harvest?

On January 20, 2001, George W. Bush took his Presidential oath of office, and in less than eight months the world witnessed the unimaginable 9/11. Too many people erroneously associate the stock market collapse at the start of the decade with the infamous terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. Effectively, it started when the dot com bubble burst, as illustrated by the tech-laden Nasdaq Index, which peaked at an all-time high of 5,048.62 on March 10, 2000. Precisely 18 months later, on the eve of September 11, the Nasdaq had fallen off a cliff to close at 1,695.38 - a precipitous 66 per cent.

What about the Dow Jones, pre-9/11? It had ended the 1990s at 11,497.12 and climbed to a then all-time high of 11,722.98 by January 14, 2000.

It closed 18 per cent lower at 9,605.51 in the 20 months to September 10, 2001.

In the wake of 9/11 American markets shut down for a week to re-open on September 17. The Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals referred to earlier, together with the scare of the SARS epidemic certainly did not help. However the Sarbanes Oxley Act was passed and helped restore investor confidence by strengthening corporate governance and tightening accounting practices for listed companies.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a five-year closing low of 7286.27 on October 9, 2002. However, at the end of 2002, most pundits were forecasting that 2003 would, for the fourth year on the trot, also end in negative territory, as had happened - just once - in the four years from 1929 to 1932. As things turned out, the beginning of 2003 saw the start of a bull market which was fuelled by the nascent property boom in the US. This in turn was stimulated by Alan Greenspan's slashing interest rates from 6.5 per cent in May 2000, to three per cent on September 17, 2001, and down to a mere one per cent on June 25, 2003.

The Dow climbed back to the 10,000 level by December. In 2004 and 2005, the market moved sideways, as interest rates climbed back to 5.25 per cent by June 29, 2006, seemingly gathering strength to move through the 11,000 mark in February 2006 and through the 12,000 barrier in October.

2007 would see fresh 1,000 point jumps as the market moved through the 13,000 level in April. Then, ignoring the first rumbles of the beginning of the credit crunch and the bursting of the property bubble in August, it hit a still unsurpassed all time high of 14,164.53 on October 9, 2007. This bull market saw the Dow climb 94.4 per cent from October 9, 2002 to exactly October 9, 2007. Incredibly, five years to the day - a unique event in stock market history.

However, two months earlier, the rumbles had already turned into tremors as the UK's Sky News showed footage of queues of depositors outside Northern Rock - the first run on a British bank in 140 years. This followed problems in the credit markets caused by the US subprime mortgage financial crisis. By February 2008, the bank was nationalised.

It was the first of many similar interventions in the UK, US and Europe.

Across the pond, on March 15, 2008 investment bank Bear Stearns, which had pioneered the securitisation and asset-backed securities markets, was absorbed - with a $25 billion commitment by the US government - by JP Morgan Chase. At its all time high, Bear Stearns' shares had traded at over $133; JP Morgan initially bought them for $2, on the insisitence of Treasury secretary Hank Paulsen, who wanted to prevent "moral hazard", the concept that risk-taking must not be made risk-free. The price was subsequently reset to $10 by JP Morgan.

However, the financial landscape was altered forever when the 158-year-old investment bank Lehman's filed for bankruptcy on September 15, caused by its overwhelming sub prime exposure. Markets had already been rocked by the nationalisation of the country's two mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - who both play a role in funding 75 per cent of all US residential mortgages. They received $100 billion. Additionally, in the two tumultuous weeks from early September 2008, the US Federal Reserve and the US Treasury, between them: 1). took over AIG, the world's largest insurance company; 2) effectively extended government deposit insurance to $3.4 trillion in money market funds; 3) temporarily banned short selling in over 900 mostly financial stocks; and most dramatic of all, 4) pledged to take up to $700 billion of toxic mortgage related assets onto its books.

In the UK, Lloyds TSB, in what has been referred to as a shotgun wedding, finalised a deal to take over its ailing rival HBOS. Royal Bank of Scotland, which owns NatWest, was saved from extinction by the UK government's intervention. The speed and scale of devastation caused by the punishing gales that pummelled even the most powerful, was such that even "here today, gone tomorrow" became "here today, gone today"! For the first time in history, governments around the world closed ranks and managed to stave off financial Armageddon, by propping up their banking systems with rescues and guarantees.

With these scenarios of the Noughties as the decade in which all tenets of finance fell apart still so fresh in recent memory, further review is superfluous. But, how was this reflected in the markets? By March 9, 2009 (that 9 again!) the Dow Jones bear market bottomed at 6,547 - a 54 per cent drop in 17 months. Yet the gargantuan bailouts, interest rate cuts to all time lows, and Quantitative Easing (printing more money) by the world's political leaders, has seen the Dow Jones, which was 34 per cent down in 2008 alone, rebound 61.7 per cent from March 9, 2009 to last Monday's close.

If, to quote Shakespeare, the past is prologue, and FDR's effect on the stock market in the 1930s proves to be the track for Obama to run on, could this be an overwhelming omen for this equally charismatic Democratic President?

Mr Bonello is managing partner of Financial Planning Services Ltd.