With cash-strapped companies coming cup-in-hand to their equally cash-strapped governments, the world over is looking for Warren Buffett-sized checkbooks to help ease the credit crunch.

Increasingly, the world is looking to China and its $1.9 trillion in reserves.

Should China whip open its gigantic checkbook to bailout the global financial system?

Does it even want to?

China’s been burned before with its investments in the U.S. financial sector. It has a 9.9% stake ($5 billion) in Morgan Stanley (MS:NYSE) that has been pummeled by the industry-wide downturn. And some Chinese leaders believe that the U.S. and Western Europe should clean up their own mess.

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Yesterday was a lovely day for me.

I was asked to speak at the Community College of Baltimore County for a group called SIFE, which stands for Students In Free Enterprise. I first spoke at the Catonsville Campus, and it was like coming home.

I practically grew up on that campus. My mother is a teacher there, and I’ve spent countless years in daycare and summer camps. I know the paths in the surrounding woods like the back of my hand.

I was honored to be introduced by my old business teacher, Mr. Larry Aaronson. All the teachers there were like family to me, and I reconnected with people I haven’t seen for 12 years. Needless to say, I wanted to impress everyone.

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As the bottom falls out of the dollar, and people’s cash goes up in a mushroom cloud of smoke, someone’s going to make a lot of money… from foreign currencies

I’m reading all the front pages this morning, and I’m seeing nothing but fear:

Bloodbath
Global Rout
Panic Selling
Roller Coaster

It’s enough to make seasoned brokers and pit traders jump out of windows, not to mention the folks who’ve watched their retirement funds lose $2 trillion (over the past year and a half). It is truly a global market meltdown.

And it would seem that there’s no safe place to run anymore. Even commodities are flopping like a fish out of water.

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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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