If you had purchased $1,000 of AIG stock one year ago, you would have about $40.00 left. With Lehman, you have about $6.00 left. With Fannie or Freddie, you would have less than $5.00 left.
But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, and had drunk all of the beer, then turned in the cans for a recycling refund, you would have had $214.
Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.
It's call the 401-Keg plan 
But I only drink bottled beer. 
then you are wasting money.
start investing now.stop bottle try can :)
Where i come from (Austria) beer bottles also carry a token (is this the correct word? Money you have to pay and get refunded when you bring the bottle back).
The glass bottles are cleaned and reused and this way there is an incentive to bring them back.
(Still, i would invest my money in a care-for-concrete-posts organization. There are way too few concrete posts in Austria. 
)
bakunin
That would be called a "deposit" in America. Some places have them. But aluminum (American spelling) is intrinsicly valuable. It gets collected almost all of the time.