Being bold and buying into the market can make you big bucks. There’s no doubt about it.

Legendary investor Sir John Templeton’s rapid rise to wealth is a case in point. He is noted for buying 100 shares of each company trading for less than $1 a share in 1939 and making many times the money back in a 4 year period.

But if you’re inattentive in this type of market, you’re going to get whacked, says Adam Lass. He predicts US blue chips could lose another 34% before the bear bottoms out. That would put the Dow at just over 5,362 points.

The ‘financialization’ of the American economy is an era coming to a close, says Mayer’s Special Situations editor and commodities expert Chris Mayer.

So it’s back to the basics of wealth creation, to what Chris calls “the basics of owning and making useful things.”

It makes sense.

As Whiskey and Gunpowder’s Greg Grillot puts it, “A cow is a much better investment than a piece of over-leveraged debt.”

“It is not just a few investment decisions that are being corrected, it’s the delusions of an entire generation.” says Bill Bonner in The Daily Reckoning. What’s happening is “a huge anti-bubble is forming … a financial whirlpool marked by exaggerated thrift, debt destruction and sweaty-palmed investors.”

It remains to be seen whether fear takes control of the markets again today. So far, global equities have seen a reprieve from the brutal pounding they suffered last week.

The crash in stock prices has most investors spooked. But it’s worth keeping you head while others lose theirs, says Strategic Investment editor Dan Amoss.

Right now, there are some very healthy resource stocks are shockingly cheap. What Dan calls “screaming bargains.”

Clusterfuck Nation author James Howard Kunstler says “a cascading collapse of international finance is underway.” And it makes makes the 1929 crash and the events of the 1930s “look like an orderly small town auction of somebody’s grandmother’s effects.”

– The German government is gearing up today to pump cash in the the bank and insurance sector. Talk is that Germans will stump up €470bn as part of the much-hyped ‘coordinated bailout’ campaign by European governments.

– The move has set off a rally in European banking stocks.

– Asian markets were also up this morning. Hong Kong shares shot up over 10%. It was the biggest one-day rise in more than 33 years.

– Meanwhile, European central banks have promised unlimited dollar funding.

Economics professor, former Clinton advisor and perma-bear forecaster Nouriel Roubini says the “severe systemic financial crisis” ripping through the markets will get worse before it gets better.

He warned investors on Bloomberg TV that the US now faces a meltdown in financials that Hank Paulson’s bailout bill won’t fix. Roubini says the bill is merely a way of “privatizing gains and socializing losses.”

He also warned investors that stock prices could fall another 20% and trigger a period of severe deflation.

Billionaire investor George Soros just gave a great interview with PBS’s Mill Moyers. In it he said the massive breakdown in turst on Wall Street marks the “end of an era.”

It’s not a new subject for Soros. He accurately predicted the crisis in subprime loans that punctured the lung of the financial markets.

In the interview Soros also slammed Treasury Sectretary Hank Paulson, saying the onetime Goldman Sachs boss was part of the very Wall Street system of “financial engineering” that caused the crisis in the first place.

– The Nikkei 225 got wiped this morning in Asian trade. Japan’s benchmark index lost another 11% of its value. It is now touching 20-year lows.

– Other world markets India dropped 9.6% as Mumbai opened for business. South Korea fell as much as 9%, Hong Kong by 9.7%, Australia by 8.4% and in Singapore lost as much as 8.4%.

– European equities “collapsed,” according to the Financial Times, “left vulnerable after a dramatic late sell-off in New York extended the sustained losing streak on world stock markets.”

“The boom years are over,” says Bill Bonner. Of course, this is what Bill has been saying all along in The Daily Reckoning. Now that’s the day of financial reckoning has come to pass, however, Bill is feeling a sense of dread. That’s because, as bad as things are right now, they look like they’re about to get worse…