This was a year of non-resolution of the financial crisis, when nothing quite jelled. The market rose, but the economy remained in the muck, and unemployment is high. The great Wall Street catastrophes of the preceding years remained unresolved, with no grand thunderclap of prosecution to bring “closure” to all involved. Yet whatever else you can say about 2010, it has been a learning experience. I know, that’s damning the year with faint praise. But at least we can take something away from the experience.

I’ve compiled five lessons we can draw from this very mixed year, in ascending order of significance:

Small-cap stock fraud will never go away. Of course, you can say that about stock fraud in general, or fraud in general, but the persistence of problems in the small-cap market was clear in 2010, even as larger institutions captured the attention. The reason is that small-cap fraud is extraordinarily lucrative—basically it involves taking nearly worthless stocks and “pumping” them to massive profits margins when they are “dumped” on an unwary public. Microcap stock fraud may seem picayune in comparison with the depredations of the big banks in the financial crisis, but it continues to erode confidence in the financial markets.

Even the smallest frauds can have large numbers of victims. I remember one microcap fraud from some years ago that ripped off 20,000 shareholders. In this space I’ve occasionally touched upon some of the hundreds of examples of small-cap fraud that keep surfacing, time and time again, despite regulatory actions that sometimes include criminal prosecution.

The Securities and Exchange Commission seems powerless to deal with some of the most egregious offenders, such as the one I profiled a few months ago, who treat SEC injunctions like waste paper. The corollary to this lesson is that criminal prosecution needs to be a bit more than a “sometime” occurrence.

Memories aren’t short—they are nonexistent. I know, this is sort of obvious, but it bears repeating. I’m not talking about the public’s memory, whose brevity is a given, but the memory of the people who are supposed to remember—the regulators, congressmen, and other individuals empowered with protecting us from future financial calamities. To some extent, this problem reflects a lack of institutional continuity, such as the rapid turnover at the Securities and Exchange Commission and other agencies. But sometimes crass politics can help erase that memory.

Consider the December 15 release of a preemptive report by Republican members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. (The official one comes out next month.) The report lays the blame for the financial crisis squarely on the laps of government, skewering government-backed mortgage insurers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the lack of government oversight. But it ignores the international dimensions of the crisis and the role of predatory lending and derivatives. By so doing, they Republicans on the commission exonerated Wall Street and the banks that engaged in deceptive practices, both in lending and in selling those derivatives to institutional investors. The 2000 law that prohibited regulation of over-the-counter derivatives isn’t even mentioned. You can treat regulatory amnesia by providing better leadership, but the political variety is harder to cure.

Short-sellers didn’t cause the Crash of 2008. One of the myths of the 2008 crash seems to have died a slow and little-noticed death. Two years ago, regulators and congressmen rushed to confront the phantom horror of traders “attacking” Wall Street firms. The hysteria culminated in an October 2009 Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi, which claimed that “a scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers—and the feds have yet to bust the culprits.” The numerous books published to date on the financial crisis have said not a word about short-selling as a factor in the decimation of financial stocks in 2008—and academic studies (such as this one) have proven that it wasn’t a factor at all. Even Taibbi’s 2010 book Griftopia says not a word about a “counterfeiting scheme” helping to kill those two upstanding banks. As they say on that cable TV show, this myth has been busted.

The SEC is helpless against the might of the big banks. This became evident when Goldman Sachs settled with the SEC over its sale of mortgage-backed securities in July, and that impartial arbiter of all news, the stock market, rejoiced. The SEC can crow about how this was the “largest penalty ever paid by Wall Street,” but, in truth, Goldman got off easy. The firm was accused of collaborating with a short-seller, John Paulson, in constructing a mortgage-backed portfolio that, the feds said, was designed to fail. Yes, that was the largest penalty ever extracted—but it also was a mere 3.4 percent of Goldman’s bonus pool. This episode shows that when banks are Too Big to Penalize, regulators are reduced to insignificance. The SEC needs an overhaul of its leadership and culture to take on the big banks—which clearly isn’t happening. Which brings me to…

Eric Schneiderman is the man to watch in 2011. Yes, I know what you’re saying: “Eric who?” He is the attorney general-elect of New York State, and he takes office on January 1. The SEC hasn’t approached its mission with anything approaching vigor since the mid-2000s, when Eliot Spitzer was the attorney general of New York. His successor, New York attorney general and governor-elect Andrew Cuomo, just recently demonstrated what a New York attorney general can do by bringing suit against Ernst & Young for allegedly helping Lehman Brothers overstate its assets.

The suit harkens back to the Spitzer era, when sleepy regulators were regularly given a rude awakening by Spitzer’s aggressive actions. Without Spitzer, the SEC of the post-Enron era would have been even less effective than it proved to be. Spitzer showed how a determined New York attorney general can use New York’s laws to club the Street into submission. Schneiderman has pledged to continue the focus on Wall Street, so all eyes will be on him. His early hires have been promising. If he uses the power of his office adroitly, he could turn out to be the biggest prod to action the SEC has ever had. To which one can only say—amen.