There was much talk about how the speculators of the boom years had vanished.
Many of the stores where owners made stands over the years have vanished.
The Hohokam, who flourished for a thousand years, had vanished by the time Europeans arrived in the mid-1500's.
Almost all the profits earned in the good years have vanished, and sector-fund investors as a group have little to show for all their fervid trading.
"Let's face it, you can't exactly get away with such indecent exposure without a big, fat citation accompanying it after your college years have vanished".
As two financial giants, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, reported fresh multibillion-dollar losses on Thursday, the industry passed a grim milestone: All of the combined profits that major banks earned in recent years have vanished.
As farmers have shifted their attention to top producing animals to maximize profits and as industrialized agriculture has replaced family farms, many minor breeds created in the last 200 years have vanished, said Dr. Donald E. Bixby, executive director of the nonprofit American Livestock Breeds Conservancy.
The effects of the downturn are similar everywhere: The once-plentiful drilling rig jobs that often paid $100,000 a year have vanished, as have many of the people who came to oil and gas regions looking for those jobs.
In Jim Jarmusch's new "Broken Flowers," as in "Rushmore" and the recent "Lost in Translation," the teasing ironist-clown of twenty years ago has vanished.
That was the beginning of the year and, as we near its end, another sparkling 62-year-old has vanished into the dark: AA Gill, greatest newspaper columnist of a generation, brimming with beans and brilliance and wit in print, kind and gentle and wise in person.
