In my larval, pre-blogging days, I always faced the back-to-school moment with abject dread.  It meant returning to a program of the most severe, mind-numbing regimentation in the ghastly New York City public schools after a summer of idyllic unreality in the New Hampshire woods, where I went to a Lord of the Flies type of summer camp.  And so here I am, many decades later, still uneasy as the final page of the August calendar flies away in a hot Santa Ana wind, and a great hellfire closes in on the far eastern reaches of Los Angeles, and the American money system falls into a peculiar limbo, and every fifth person is out of work, or going bankrupt, or glugging…

The U.S. government is starting to see profits from the $750 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), started last year to thwart the financial crisis.

Friday’s edition of The Wall Street Journal picks up on the theme of the long road of pain ahead for bank shareholders in the US. In ‘Banks on Sick List Top 400,’ the WSJ details several ugly highlights from the latest FDIC Quarterly Banking Profile, published last Thursday.

The bank failure scene in the U.S. turned a shade uglier over the weekend. By this time tomorrow, it’ll probably be even worse.

Today’s global stock sell-off really started on Friday, when the U.S. suffered its worst bank failure of 2009. Alabama-based Colonial Bank gasped its last breath late Friday. With roughly $25 billion in assets, it was the biggest bank failure since Washington Mutual back in September.

Did Goldman Sachs get too greedy this time? If so, the gravy train could be coming to an end…

A large “mystery” bank is scrambling for late night cash.   At the close of the quarter, an unnamed bank paid 7% for overnight money from the Fed.  The mainstream and the Fed claim this to be normal behavior at the end of the quarter, but don’t believe it for a second.

A total of 10 U.S. banks have now repaid the preference share investments in them made by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), thus demonstrating that the government thinks they are sound. A number of others have yet to pay back that federal infusion. For investors, the question is this: Where do we go from here?

In the newspapers there is much discussion of what General Motors (NYSE:GM) should do. This discussion has gone on for many years. Until now, it was a conversation carried on by serious analysts and auto industry experts. They all said the same thing: GM needed to clear out its management, dump much of its expensive, “legacy” overhead, and produce better cars. Why didn’t it do so?

Renowned investor George Soros said Friday the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, and there’s no near-term bottom to this financial crisis in sight.