You know it's been a lousy year when you find yourself yawning at market turmoil. Assuming that you haven't lost your business, your job or your home, this unending siege of bad economic news is getting, well, tiresome. There's too much bad news to process, and it's all starting to feel similar. WaMu giving the heave-ho to its CEO? We've seen it before. Lehman teetering on the brink of doom? Been there. Stocks rocketing up and down hundreds of points a day? Bought the T-shirt. As I'm writing this, it's almost my birthday. What I want? No more drama for a while.

The real shocker is the government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government-supported enterprises (GSEs) whose mortgage-buying activities made owning a home possible for much of the middle class. Almost all of you reading this, like me, are too young to remember what it was like to buy a home before Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started packaging and reselling mortgages. It was harder. Maybe that was wise, in a macroeconomic sense, but families don't live in macros. Home ownership makes families and neighborhoods more stable and prosperous—or at least it's so when people can pay their bills.

So what went wrong? As GSEs, Fannie and Freddie should have been the epitome of a low-risk investment. Now we're seeing stockholders' equity wiped out and even preferred stocks' value in doubt as the government rides into a rescue that will cost taxpayers God knows how much. Was the management philosophy at the two firms a perfect cocktail of heedlessness and greed?

Of course, I'm hearing plenty of gallows humor and doomsday predictions, including dates and times for the federal government to declare itself insolvent.

The runaway speculation is the closest I get to a good omen for a turnaround. I'll cross my fingers and make a wish on my candles that the worst has already come to light and is on its way to being set straight.

In the meantime, as independent advisors, you have the privilege of being able to focus on your clients. In difficult markets they need your advice more than ever, and their goals have not changed: retirement, education, wealth-management, legacy planning. These needs are not going anywhere, and therefore, neither are you. It's a great time to be an independent advisor, as Larry Roth, CEO of AIG's Advisor Group, and his executive team point out in an exclusive interview with FP. You have the freedom to devise the very best possible solutions for your clients—and you have their trust. That's a powerful position when people are tired of surprises.