Deja vu all over again… are stocks just following the 2008 playbook?… Bill Jenkins shares his favorite global currency… Gold bugs beware: Gold chart forecasts a sell-off… Yet league of famous funds (and Chris Mayer) are buying up gold stocks… Plus, are we reading this right? A bank bails out the government?

General Motors Corp. (NYSE: GM) is closing in quickly on its June 1 deadline to finish overhauling its operations, or opt for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Because that deadline is actually one week from yesterday (Monday), analysts and investors will be watching GM closely this week.

President Barack Obama sent lawmakers a budget package today (Thursday) that proposes to shrink or eliminate 121 federal programs and save almost $17 billion in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. But the budget plan contains cuts that will face vigorous opposition in Congress and fierce resistance from special interest groups.

The snowball that was Obama’s bailout plan rolled downhill this week, gathering to it all manner of trash and stones.

As Senate Republicans and Democrats continue to bicker over the details of President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner waits in the wings ready to unveil yet another bank bailout bill. 

As the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression continues to worsen, decades of deregulation and the growing independence at the state level are being reversed as a deteriorating national economy forces the federal government to increasingly take on responsibilities that no other institution has the power or resources to handle.

Ghosts of the fourth quarter haunt global financials… so begins the second act of the credit saga… Even the IMF needs a loan… $150 billion to back up struggling emerging markets… Not so fast, says Mayer… emerging markets will remain drivers of global growth… Jim Nelson with an industry likely to boom in 2009… Wayne Burritt’s short-term trading advice… with S&P 500 price targets… Plus, Russia-Ukraine gas dispute not yet over… a reader provides firsthand account.

Morgan Stanley (MS) and Citigroup Inc. (C) are about to launch a joint venture of their brokerage units in a move that may be motivated as much by a desire to placate impatient government overseers as by financial imperatives.

President-elect Barack Obama yesterday (Monday) asked Congress to release the remaining $350 billion in bank bailout money that’s part of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). In a letter addressed to the leadership of both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, top Obama economic aide Lawrence H. “Larry” Summers highlighted five key reasons the incoming president is seeking use of what remains of the U.S. Treasury Department’s $700 billion TARP.