A Worse Bear Market Than 2001?

We are all aware that the economy has slowed -- but how bad is the situation, really?

Every month TheStreet.com Ratings analyzes and rates over 10,000 stock mutual funds. In order to better understand how far we have fallen and how bad things are, we looked at the level of returns being achieved now in 2008 as compared with the same time last year.

For simplicity's sake, we limited our comparison to all stock mutual funds that had a one-year return above 15% for both time periods.

As of January, 2007, there were nearly 1,400 stock mutual funds that earned a one-year return of 15% or higher; for this January, that number has plummeted to just 270 funds. That's an 80% decline. ...