1. Three more banks were shutdown today. They were TeamBank, National Association, Paola, KS , Colorado National Bank, Colorado Springs, CO and FirstCity Bank, Stockbridge, GA. The full list of failed banks in 2009 can be found at the FDIC page Failed banks list.

2. List of Banks by Country – from Wikiepdia

3. Get the latest business news from blogs: Via Newflashr – the all-in-one news search enging.

4. The Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, has passed controversial legislation enabling the state to seize control of ailing commercial lender Hypo Real Estate. German Parliament Approves Hypo Real Nationalization Bill

5.Finding a parking spot for your Mercedes or BMW on Greenwich Avenue, the main shopping strip of the U.S. hedge-fund capital, used to be a challenge. Not anymore. Greenwich’s `Rodeo Drive’ Abandoned by Customers as Hedge Funds Collapse

6.What Makes A Good Bank Good? As our Board Performance Scorecard show, high profitability, a strong balance sheet, and outstanding asset quality are what it takes to be become a high-performance bank.

7.It couldn’t always have been like this. No, the country today would be a far different place if across the span of American history had the nation constantly chosen to focus on the most picayune of arcane and unimportant irrelevancies, as it’s doing currently with the AIG bonus controversy, instead of on matters with some actual import.US Fed’s move is the bigger problem

8.While the world talks about new ways to save struggling banks, there are a handful of economists who think some banks shouldn’t be saved at all. American economist James Galbraith told Manager Magazin that it might make more sense to break them up and start over. Financial Crisis Caused by a ‘Culture of Complicity

9.Investors can improve their odds by learning how to assess the fundamentals of the gold exploration companies. A good tool for this job is what I call “The Five M’s.”

By using the Five M’s, an individual investor can build a simple but powerful model to initially sort through the many hundreds of upstart gold companies to find better opportunities.The “Five M’s” for picking gold stocks

10. An excellent site for researching UK and other market stocks: http://www.Digitallook.com