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The one bright spot of this entire mess is that we can now afford to travel to places in Europe and Asia that had become prohibitively expensive over the last two years.

This goes beyond absurd. Many of the investment banks that have required public money to stay afloat, and some that haven't stayed afloat, are still planning to pay out billions in bonuses. This is an outrage.

Alpha Bank and Trust was closed last Friday by the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was named receiver. This is the ninth bank failure in 2008.

The entire world wants to upgrade from a Nokia, a Motorola or a RIMM device to an IPhone.

There's a lot of bad news out there but there are also some positive things happening. A story that has gotten somewhat lost in the credit and banking crisis is the fact that the price of oil has collapsed. It was trading as high as $140/barrel last summer and today finished below $65/barrel.

There's another bank acquisition to report. PNC Corp. with the assistance of the TARP program, has purchased Ohio based National City. The combined bank will have a core deposit base of $180 billion, making PNC the fifth largest U.S. bank by deposits.

I'm not familiar with Peter Boockvar or his investing record but I thought it was interesting that analysts are not starting to talk about more drops in the markets. Before the talk was about whether we had hit a floor at 8,000.

We noticed today that Crestmark Bank is not taking new CD money which we thought was a little strange. So we called them and spoke with their Controller who says this is just normal business and all is fine.

Citibank is offering a competitive 6 month CD paying 4% APY.

Sandisk's CEO managed to destroy a better offer to acquire his company than Yahoo's.

Global markets of all sort are moving up and down with incredible quickness and volume. Is the precipitous nature of today's global markets good or bad?

The WSJ stepped into the high yield online savings world with an article on transfer times using online banks. There wasn't a lot of new information but it was a decent recap of why it takes 2-4 days to process a transfer.

ING has joined the rate raising crowd. Even though interest rates are projected to drop, banks are keeping their rates steady, or even raising them. I'm not complaining.

Quicken is going to the freemium model. They're offering their base service free now to compete against several other free online services and then offering upgrades to more powerful services. Still, for the average user, the free service is good news.

Jim Cramer decides to raise the ante on his theatrics by insulting all AIG employees. Outrages, the new AIG CEO Ed Liddy demands an apology. Tune in for more as the world turns...