The Death of the Death of Finance

NEW YORK (TheStreet)-- The more things die, the more they stay the same.

During the past 12 months, boneheaded writers like me have pronounced many things dead. With the one-year anniversary of Lehman upon us and the market somehow rallying beyond virtually anyone's expectation, it seems like a decent time to look at what has actually died. The quick and easy answer is, not much.

And while we reflect on what has died and what hasn't, it is also worth thinking about what's been pronounced dead, and by how many people. The idea being to add some kind of quantitative analysis, however imperfect, to such a highly qualitative debate.

Toward that end, I did a Google search pairing the words "Death of," with various companies and sub-industries of finance. The results have their peculiarities, but in general I'd say the more results something got, the more dead it is:

Google Death List Media 15.2m Freddie and Fannie 9.49m Finance 9.45m Fannie and Freddie 993,000 Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae 0 Lehman Brothers 2.32m Wall Street 2.18m Hedge funds 1.36m Bear Stearns 1.32m Bernard Madoff 1.12m Bernie Madoff 0 Investment banking 527,000 Investment banks 210,000 Private equity 450,000 Citigroup 152,000 AIG 123,000 Securitization 42,500 Wells Fargo 3 Goldman Sachs 2 Morgan Stanley 2 Source: Google search results

Take private equity (450,000 results). Often pronounced dead, the dirty truth is that the industry is essentially impossible to kill. That's because, in the good times, big institutions like CalPERS and Harvard University signed generous deals with private equity firms allowing them to hold onto their money for years and years.

Because private equity is, well, private, it is especially difficult to know about all the problems the industry may be having. But since some buyout firms are public, we can get at least some insight from the stock market. The most prominent of the listed firms is The Blackstone Group (BX), whose shares are roughly flat over the past year, better than Wells Fargo (WFC), Bank of America (BAC) and General Electric (GE).