Star One Smart Blog's

From the CityPaper...
This smiling bozo is CitiBank's ex-CEO Charles Prince. He resigned Friday after losses totaling 11 BILLION dollars in subprime mortgage (s)hit the Citi. On top of 6.5 BILLION last quarter. Last week, Merrill Lynched their CEO Stanley O'Neil, for similar reasons.

From the article...

"Prince has struggled to improve results at Citigroup, especially in U.S. consumer banking, its biggest business.

He had also been under enormous pressure to cut expenses, including from the New York-based bank's largest individual investor, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal."

Well, I suppose we knew that, didn't we?

Just last month, Bank of America's earnings dropped 32%, not so much because of their questionable subprime mortages, but just as a sympathy fall since so many other banks were hit...

The chief reason was a $1.3 billion fall in earnings from the bank's Global Corporate and Investment Banking division, largely based in New York. The costs of provisions for bad loans rose $865 million, which the bank partly blamed on a weaker US housing market that required it to add reserves for home equity and home builder loans whose borrowers were falling behind on payments.

and

"The problem for them isn't subprime holdings, the problem is what happened in the markets because of subprime,"

Bank of America, based in Charlotte, is the largest US bank. We watch them closely, to see what's shaking out at the top of the tree, falling on the rest of the banking industry.

So, on top of our other problems (invented or real), we've this great shaking in the financial treetops. Monkeys are falling out like rotten coconuts. Except rotten coconuts rarely have golden parachutes.

Can we, the investors, still buy gold?