Tuesday Links

• King World News talks to Chris Whalen. Listen here. Mr. Whalen is quite knowledgeable on banks, bank balance sheets, and the risks that lie therein.
• A look at CDS (Credit Default Swaps) in Europe. Some terrific charts. From ZeroHedge blog
• A story on CDS trading in America.  I'm not sure if I'm buying the gist of this story, but it's still worth the read.  From Bloomberg
• Story on "Synthetic Banking" from Vega Strategies, via ZeroHedge blog
• Some funny business going on at the Mutual Funds.  Some years a go I thought Mutual Funds were great.  Now I think they encourage investor laziness, inappropriate relationships between fund management and corporate boards, and I think individual investors can make better decisions doing their own homework and their own research.  Fund managers care about enriching themselves, not you.   From Bloomberg
• A stupendously great post on inflation from Menzie Chinn of Econbrowser blog
• Quinton Carter of Oklahoma football shows us that student athletes can have a positive and profound effect on their community.  If you watch the BIG 12 Football Championship Game this Saturday at 7pm on ABC,  Quinton will be the guy playing defense with long hair flowing out of the back of his helmet.  He's a blur of Speed.  From www.Big12sports.com
• Nate Silver talking about....  baseball (Warning: Yankees haters can skip this link). From FiveThirtyEight blog
• Chinese selling garbage stocks to Americans.  Theoretically the stock exchanges like NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) are supposed to stop these things from happening. But hey, if securities dealers can screw the American public out of money and commission fees, what's wrong with that??? From ZeroHedge blog
• Our Female Vision of the Day: Helena Bonham Carter. Pic from reelmovienews.com