CIT dodges bullet, others report super-sized earnings… are banks really on the mend? Greg Guenther with a safe way to play the volatile biotech sector… California finally plugs its budget gap… with taxes, debt and accounting fraud… Chris Mayer on a rising dilemma for miners of the world… Plus, even the dead can’t dodge the recession… backyard burials booming…

Analysts are starting to pile into the biotech bandwagon now. And for good reason: the AMEX Biotech Index is actually lower today than it was nine years ago.  Translated into investor-speak, the opportunities in biotech today are fantastic.

I’m used to explosive gains in the biotech world, but I’ve never seen a moonshot quite like this…  As I write (TIME), shares of Vanda Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: VNDA) are up 712% today. 

With so many biotech stocks making big moves and pharmaceutical merger activity moving faster than anything else right now, we turned to one of the smartest analysts in the lucrative biotech field to give us his take on what we should be doing…

In 2002, Alkermes thought it had a winner on its hands… The small biotech and its Big Pharma partner, Johnson & Johnson, had developed the drug Risperdal Consta to combat schizophrenia. It was a great deal for a while… The market assumed the drug would be approved by the FDA the first time around.