Consolidation comes in many forms… Buying up assets or operations, buying stakes in operations or companies, merging operations, takeovers, the list goes on and on.

But one thing that has started gaining interest in the mainstream media is exchange consolidation.

Remember last summer when the Chicago Merchantile Exchange bought the Chicago Board of Trade? Or when the Group decided to by Nymex the following March for $11 billion? Or when NYSE Euronext bid for AMEX? When Nasdaq wanted to buy London and the OMX?

These merging markets offer considerable cost savings, a uniform platform, and an ease of cross-transactions that could ultimately create a “flat world” of international trading.

This behavior is starting to trickle into emerging markets as regional stock exchanges gain market capitalization and foreign interest. For example, Wiener Börse, operator of the Vienna stock market, just announced that it would buy the majority stake in the Prague Stock Exchange.

The deal is worth about $264 million, and Wiener Börse beat out other regional rivals, like Deutsche Boerse and the OMX Nordic Exchange. The Warsaw Exchange, Wiener Börse’s main competitor, was kept out of the bidding process because it’s a state-owned business.

But this isn’t the first market Vienna’s gotten its paws on…

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No doubt everyone who wasn’t net-short the market has a smile on his face today.

Today’s rally is some welcome news, especially for those companies and countries who have been unfairly sucked down by the “Black Hole” I talked about last week.

Now, I’m not gonna say this is the end of the downside global markets have been experiencing over the past weeks and months. I don’t have a crystal ball, and I don’t read Tarot. And in a market where everyone’s looking for “the answer” I don’t want to tell you something I’m not absolutely sure of myself.

Instead, we’ll look at some of the best analysis we can and make some educated decisions about what to do next in Taipan Trader.

In the mean time, let’s take a look at what this recent upswing has done to emerging markets.

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Major markets around the world are being sucked into the black hole that is the U.S. economic crisis.

There are those that say we need to share the blame, and yes, there are banks in the UK and in Germany, and other Western economies, that have wandered down the same path and ended up in the same bramble bush… But the U.S. financial system has really become the black hole of the global economic universe.

Just look at all the cash that was thrown into the system: $12.5 billion injected into Citigroup by the government of Singapore and the Kuwait Investment Authority; China Investment Corp. paided $5 billion for a 9.9% stake in Morgan Stanley; Merrill Lynch got $6.6 billion from Korea…

And that doesn’t include the investments in other institutions across the pond, like the investments in Barclays by Singapore’s Temasek and the Qatar Investment Authority, or the Credit Suisse, Standard Charter, and UBS investments from SWFs around the world.

As you can imagine, these folks aren’t happy that their investments have all but disappeared. They’re not likely to make any similar investments in the near future, either.

And that leaves a gigantic wound in the financial machine… A black hole that continues to suck investor’s cash down a never-ending drain.

Thought the Dow would hold at 10,000? It didn’t.

Think the $700 billion “Death Star” bailout will contain the problem to just the U.S.? It won’t.

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These are the days when four-letter words buzz like flies on a corpse.

I spent this morning in a meeting with my fellow analysts to discuss what the next best investment opportunity will be.

I have to say, the mood was positively dismal once we heard the Dow dropped below 10,000. The buzz still hasn’t died, and I know some of my colleagues are still frantically sending messages on their Blackberries.

Yes, folks, it’s another record down day here in the U.S.

You can gawk, you can cry, you can yell and scream…

Or you can grab risk by the horns and snap up some really great deals. It’ll mean finding those obscure markets, or those beaten so severely that shares are selling well below the value of the company.

And that means that you can make some serious money down the road.

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