Bottom line: The current rout in financial sector shares might smell awful to the simple onlooker. But smart investors should know that it smells like the beginning of the end of their collapse, too.

“Two-hundred dollar oil would break the back of the global economy,” Adam Sieminski, chief energy economist at Deutsche Bank AG (DB), told Bloomberg News in an interview yesterday (Wednesday) in Tokyo. “Next step after $200 would be global recession and bad news for everybody.”

Wamu popped 18% today. Will Goldman or Buffett really bail them out?

Goldman Sachs looks at the value of bond insurers under three different scenarios.

Does Goldman Sachs really have a higher intelligence that kept it from falling into to the same subprime trap everyone else on Wall Street fell into? I found this to be a very interesting and well thought out article.

Interesting

The blowup of 2 Bear Stearns Funds in June07 that froze the credit markets was the tipping point for equities in 07. Investors seeking low risk, high yield, predictable and stable returns balked and said "No Mas." Central banks became lenders of last resort to the global financial system.

When the world was running around talking of the "subprime meltdown" and the "freezing of credit markets" Goldman quietly looked at the situation and placed their bets accordingly.

Miller says stocks are the cheapest they've been since January 1991 (16-plus years)!

Do you own a lot of BIG (safe) banks? Well, think again.

Highlights from last week's Ira W. Sohn Investment Research Conference. This report is a bit more detailed than the New York Times article and includes more stocks that were mentioned during the conference. (Subscription required)

Bloomberg article on financial stocks. Quotes Dreman as saying: "We've always been big financial owners. We're buying stocks through the selloff." There are few specifics in this article; it's mostly a general overview of financial stocks and what has hurt them recently.

A Businessweek article about Jim Huguet, president and co-CEO of Great Companies. Basically, this is an interview with a fund manager. I wouldn't call it a value portfolio, but it does focus on great businesses led by great managers.