As Whiskey and Gunpowder’s Greg Grillot puts it, “A cow is a much better investment than a piece of over-leveraged debt.”

These are worrying times. Not only for investors, but also for anyone with their savings in US banks. Already, some of the biggest names in banking have gone belly up. How do you know whether you bank is safe or not? Keith Fitz-Gerald in Money Morning says there are three steps you can take to make sure your bank is safe.

Wall Street is still in chaos. Yesterday, regulators seized America’s biggest savings and loan bank WaMu (NYSE:WM) and sold it to JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM). It was the most spectacular bank failure in US history. The crisis, and the bungled attempts of the government to ‘fix’ it, is setting up some great contrarian investment plays.

Taipan Daily editor Justice Litle says it’s likely that “we’ll see the price of stocks, commodities and paper assets in general explode into the stratosphere.”