This has probably been the most interesting year in many moons for both foreign and domestic stock markets.

I’ve been perusing returns of stock markets outside the U.S. and here is a brief report on what has been happening.

We’ll look at some of the countries that have been in the headlines in 2011. The name we’ve heard most often is Greece.

As I write this on Dec. 5, the Greek stock market, while not sizable, has declined more than 50 percent in 2011.

Big surprise, huh? In Europe, the losses are all double digits except for the U.K., which is only down about 6 percent.

Another country in the news has been Italy. This year, the Italians have suffered stock market losses of more than 23 percent.

Belgium is down almost 20 percent. The Euro Stoxx Index, which is a reflection of most European markets, is down more than 17 percent. In the Asia Pacific Rim, the DJ Asia-Pacific index is down more than 14 percent, Taiwan is off more than 20 percent and China and Japan are both down 15 percent.

South Korea is down just more than 6 percent. In the Americas, Brazil and Chile are both down more than 16 percent. Mexico is down less than 5 percent and Canada is down about 10 percent.

You know, if you look at this with all the bad things going on, the numbers are generally not too bad. I’ve always said that it is difficult to get back 50 percent losses, but 20 percent is manageable.

Overall, the world stock market, excluding the U.S., according to the DJ Global index is down about 14 percent. Your foreign investments have likely not done well, but they have rallied substantially off the lows.

OK, what is going on around here? The Wilshire 5000, which measures most stocks traded in the U.S., is slightly positive, less than 1 percent. To me that is incredible. In my view, that just strengthens my opinion that we have the best and strongest economy in the world.

For our markets to have sloughed off most of the world’s negativism may bode well for us. The individual indexes according to market capitalization, which is the total value of the stock for each company, show some diverse returns. The Russell 2000, which reflects small cap stock performance, is down about 6 percent, the S&P Midcap 400 is down 2.9 percent and the Standard and Poor’s 500 index of large companies is down just more than 1 percent. The Nasdaq Composite is down 1 percent.

The Investor’s Business Daily mutual fund index is down about 3.5 percent. Boys and girls, this is not bad. Earlier this year, I thought the markets could really get busted but that just goes to show you what I know. We did lose some money from the top earlier this year, but that means nothing. We never had it to begin with.

In our wallets, let us take a look at some of the more popular classes of commodities. Gold is up almost 23 percent year-to-date, natural gas is down 18 percent, crude oil is up 10 percent.

Recent trends in stuff we consume have been good for us but could be turning. Things like corn, soybeans, sugar and wheat are way off their highs, which is good for us.

Cattle and hogs have pretty much stayed high, which is not good for us consumers. Overall, the DJ-UBS Commodity index is down almost 10 percent, which is not bad news for consumers. Commodities have become scattered all over the place and no one knows where they are going.

I was looking at some interest rate returns from The Wall Street Journal’s edition of Dec. 5, and if you are borrowing money the news should be mostly good. These are very general numbers but should be close. Thirty-year fixed mortgages average about 4.17 percent. If you depend on returns from bonds, certificates of deposit or money market funds, there is not much good news. The average return on money market funds is 0.51 percent; a five year CD will net you about 1.46 percent. If you are a bank, no good news there as FED Fund returns are 0.25 percent. It doesn’t get much worse than that.

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I suspect that there are going to be some unexpected capital gains this year in some mutual funds. I know of a couple that are paying huge gains. Why is that? One reason is that liquidations, investors selling their shares, cause some funds to sell long-term positions, which they had large gains in just to meet redemptions. If you don’t want to be surprised, whoever manages your money should know about most of these. For some reason, investors don’t like paying taxes on gains when the stock market is not performing well.

Howie Pentony is a Saxonburg client portfolio manager.