Just when I think I have heard it all, they come up with something even more eye-poppingly incredible. That's right folks. First they sucked you into the dot-com boom; then wiped out your tech stocks. Next they urged you to buy houses with money you couldn't pay back -- and those houses plunged in value while the global stock markets lost half their value -- further decimating your net worth.

Now they want to give you the once in a lifetime opportunity to buy the very toxic waste that is sinking the entire global financial system. And if you have a job in state government, your pension fund may be enticed into this financial sludge as well.

Have we reached the bottom yet? That's a question that people ask me from time to time. I haven't got an answer yet, but today I have some numbers that may give us an idea. And the preliminary verdict is: No!

Why? Because the commercial banking industry in the U.S. is likely to be bankrupt -- by which I mean its liabilities could exceed its assets -- as we approach the bottom.

Just how bad will it get? It could see 41% of its core capital wiped out by loan losses alone. And when you take into account all the toxic waste and derivatives on the banks' books -- its capital looks mighty thin.

On Monday, the stock market rose 498 points -- a move that many attributed to the announcement over the weekend of a plan to buy $1 trillion in toxic waste that uses government loans to lure investors -- such as hedge funds -- into buying extremely risky securities.

That sounds like the same thing that got us into the financial crisis in the first place. It also sounds like the sort of thing that hedge funds do for a living -- and those hedge funds are making a handful of skilled people into billionaires.