Quoted: 20 Top-performing stocks . These Fortune 500 stocks offered some of the best returns to shareholders last year. Will they keep rising?

Quoted: The dollar is in a tailspin, the trade deficit is growing and a recession is on the horizon. The American way of life is in serious danger. But the head of the Federal Reserve keeps on pumping easy credit into the system -- a crazy policy that will worsen the crisis.

Google Finance just added a stock screener. The main advantage I see over Yahoo's is that the UI is simple, and you don't need Java. The main disadvantage is that it is missing the PEG ratio.

Quoted: I think this is basically a good idea. If the government is going to bail out the people trading with Bear Stearns in an effort to calm the markets, then they might as well go right to the source of the poison and clean up the mortgage mess. But it has to be done right. And I think that insuring the mortgages instead of buying them, as was done in the depression, is an idea with some merit.

One of the simplest and best explanations of the subprime crisis - with cartoons and a narrative. Why isn't everything explained this way? This is how my discrete math professor taught his class during my freshman year at CMU.

Thanks Ken.

The Mar 19th issue has a number of articles attempting to explain the credit crisis. I found the following interesting:

Quoted: In a recent study Martin Barnes of BCA Research, a Canadian economic-research firm, traces the rise of the American financial-services industry's share of total corporate profits, from 10% in the early 1980s to 40% at its peak last year (see chart 1). Its share of stockmarket value grew from 6% to 19%. These proportions look all the more striking—even unsustainable—when you note that financial services account for only 15% of corporate America's gross value added and a mere 5% of private-sector jobs.

FDIC insured CD's in world currencies. The interest rates are lower for stronger currencies, however.

Quoted: World Currency CDs from EverBank: Diversify your portfolio globally with foreign currencies and earn CD interest rates available in major foreign countries.

Quoted: Google is down $35 a share to around $451 and continues to be under pressure. Why? comScore came out with January U.S. paid search data and it doesn’t look good. Google’s sponsored clicks were down 7 percent month-over-month, effectively flat year-over-year and down 12 percent quarter-over-quarter.

The first few weeks of this year have been brutal -- erasing nearly all the gains from last year.

Quoted: Stocks suffered their biggest losses since November as new problems in financial stocks just plain frightened many investors and official Washington started to cobble together plans to stave off a recession.