This post is part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst in Money 2008 feature.

In a year of financial chaos, how can one even narrow the choice of most shocking financial collapse to just five candidates? Financial collapses took down venerable Wall Street firms and government enterprises. Even an entire country fell on the weight of this worldwide financial storm. There were so many financial casualties that the task to narrow this down to just five was difficult. We have chosen these five and placed them in alphabetical order.

Bear Stearns
Bear Stearns held a respected place on Wall Street dating back to before the Great Depression, but in March 2008, this once-respected Wall Street firm was bought by JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) for just $2 per share (or about $236 million). The stock price had been $36.75 on March 14, 2008 -- just two days before the JPMorgan deal was struck. Bear Stearns had been the most aggressive player in packaging and selling mortgage-backed securities, and their hedge funds were heavily loaded with the junk they sold. Many saw the fall of Bear Stearns as justice because it was the only major Wall Street bank that did not work with the Fed and participate in the $3 billion bailout of Long Term Capital Management in 1998. Payback is a bitch.

This post is part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst in Money 2008 feature.

The digital revolution? The frugalista movement? Social networking? Or As-seen-on-TV products? 2008 has changed the landscape of how we recreate, communicate, shop, and dream. What product would you consider the Best Breakout Product of 2008?

Amazon Kindle

Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) Kindle is not the first attempt to replace the paper book with an electronic reader, but it has succeeded (and how -- even now, over a year since its launch, the wait time for a new unit is a couple of months) where others failed for several reasons. The first is the reading experience. The Kindle's cutting-edge electronic paper technology provides crisp, clean print in any light conditions. The device is thin and light enough to carry anywhere, and can store hundreds of books at your fingertips.

The second reason for its success is the access to a huge library of literature, which can be accessed via a built-in wireless link (no computer needed) through the Sprint cell phone system. Virtually all new books are available in Kindle format, and many, many others (190,000 and counting). Top newspapers such as the New York Times also offer Kindle subscriptions, and schools are beginning to adopt it as the platform for electronic versions of textbooks. In the race to lead the transition to electronic books, Amazon's Kindle has broken free of the pack.

This post is part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst in Money 2008 feature.

In the decades to come, business school students will be faced with a plethora of examples from 2008 in studying how not to do something.

Picking one business decision as the worst is sort of like choosing a favorite child. Each was wretchedly awful in their own unique way. They each deserve their own wing in the hall of shame, but there only can be one winner. In my mind, the company that consistently shot itself in the foot with a heretofore unknown precision was American International Group Inc. (NYSE: AIG).

Of course, AIG is now owned by the U.S. government, largely thanks to two bailouts. The government ripped up the first $85 billion deal after determining that the New York-based company needed an even bigger life preserver of $150 billion. Even then, it managed to post a $24.5 billion loss.

What set the standard for corporate hubris, though, were the junkets. There was a fun-in-the-sun getaway to a resort in California, only days after the $85 billion bailout went through. Recently, it was disclosed that another junket was held in Arizona. Though the amount of money involved in the gatherings was piddly, the principle at stake was not. AIG was telling people -- especially members of Congress who approved the bailout -- that nothing had changed when, of course, everything had.