Powerful investors across the world have woken up to the possibility that Scotland may vote to break up the United Kingdom next week (9/18), with some already preparing defensive action that risks a potentially dangerous flight from sterling and Britain's bond market.

Japan's biggest bank, Nomura, has advised clients to slash financial exposure to the UK and brace for a possible collapse of the pound after polls showed the independence campaign running neck and neck, warning that the separation of England and Scotland after more than 300 years would be a "cataclysmic shock."

Stephen Jen, head of SLJ Macro Partners and a Chinese-speaker from Taiwan, said Asian investors are flabbergasted by the sight of an ancient and successful union tearing itself apart for no obvious reason. "It is totally bizarre. They simply don't understand it, and nor do I. Until a week and half ago everybody thought there was a zero probability of Scotland voting Yes," he said.

"We have always assumed the United Kingdom would stay united, but now everything we thought about the UK has suddenly been tested, and will have to be repriced."

Simon Derrick, from Bank of New York Mellon, said the UK is leveraged to global financial cycle and has become a magnet for the "carry trade", sucking in funds from Japan, the Middle East and other regions searching for yield.

Mr. Derrick said a 15% plunge in sterling is "quite conservative" given the dangers of a messy divorce. "We think the high $1.40s against the dollar is entirely feasible. People always underestimate how far sterling can fall when the tide turns," he said.

Are the Democrats determined to give the House back to the Republicans in 2008?  It sure seems that way with Nancy "The Shrew" Pelosi's petty vindictiveness on such national display that already there's Democrat talk of replacing her as Speaker.

And now right on the heels of her Jack Murtha/Steny Hoyer, Jane Harman/Alcee Hastings debacles comes Charlie Rangel riding to the Republicans' rescue by advocating a return to the military draft.

The extreme hate-America left-wing Democrat from Harlem will be Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in the 110^th Congress, a position of extraordinary influence and power.   His is one of the key public faces of the new Dem Majority.

And he has handed the GOP Minority a diamond-studded opportunity to explain to every young voter in America the Democrat threat to their personal liberty.

How would most Americans and Congress react if a foreign government passed laws regulating U.S. businesses and people in the United States?

Probably with justified outrage. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act or FATCA is U.S. financial imperialism at its worst.  It's causing great resentment in much of the world, which is hurting U.S. interests.

The administration and many in Congress seem to have learned nothing from the Obamacare disaster. Now that they have destroyed the world's best health care system, they are in the process of further destroying what was at one time a very functional global financial system.

In its place, they would erect a tax law whose costs were far higher than its benefit, that may drive hundreds of billions of dollars of job-creating foreign capital out of the United States, and that could trigger a global financial crisis.  Only the Democrats could do something so sinister and masochistic -- and try to stymie any Republican effort to repeal it.