On Tuesday, Warren Buffett declared that he has offered to assume liability for insurance on the municipal bonds that three major bond insurers now cover, to the tune of $800 billion.

The good news is that one firm has already rejected the offer, Buffett says. So it must feel it’s okay without the help of Berkshire Hathaway. I guess that’s not altogether a bad thing, huh? I mean, I’m not totally sure that I’ll be all right without the help of Berkshire Hathaway.

I own some bonds. Until recently, I thought they were completely safe. The idea that the insurance companies that cover them could fail never occurred to me. When everybody started talking about that possibility, I don’t mind telling you I felt a certain amount of unease. The phrase “wake up screaming” comes to mind.

Now here comes Warren Buffett to save the day, offering to prop up the situation not just with financial power, but with the one thing that we all need right now: confidence that there’s somebody running the store who just might know what’s going on and is prepared to put his money where his mouth is.

I get a kick out of Bono jumping in to ameliorate third world debt. I get goose pimply when I hear all the philanthropic stuff coming out of Davos. But this kind of thing really floats my debentures.

You have to look more than a hundred years back to find an act of comparable magnitude, I think. It was 1895. There was a panic in the markets. The U.S. Treasury was out of gold to back our currency. And J.P. Morgan stepped in to prop up the entire monetary system of the United States with his own capital and a bunch of money from abroad.

Every now and then we get to a place where certain individuals are doing better than the nation-states they live in.  It’s rare when one of them offers to fulfill a quasi-governmental role to re-establish confidence in the system that produced all that value for them.

So thanks, Mr. Buffett. Not just for the willingness to secure $800,000,000,000 in liability. There is that, of course. But also for giving us the feeling that there is a man behind the curtain, and that someday, some way, he’s going to make sure everything’s gonna be all right.

The news coming out of Davos, as always, makes me kind of queasy and resentful. The sight of the world’s super-capitalists, including some former communists, cavorting with canapes coming out of their ears is an annual source of amusement and irritation. I’ve been to enough boondoggles. I know what these guys are up to.

Big news today seems to be about a party thrown by the Russians that included moguls ice skating. Serge Brin of Google (GOOG) reportedly came off the ice with red cheeks. In other news, a trader who earned in the neighborhood of 100,000 euros a year seems to be responsible for a $7 billion swindle. He is now on the run. Times have changed. When I made 100,000 euros a year, all I had was signatory authority for a department lunch. Are the grownups still in charge of the candy store? Two things caught my eye emerging from this orgy of schnapps and self-congratulation. The first was a blog in the New York Times that commented on the power of sovereign wealth funds — huge pots of money controlled by States around the globe — representatives of which gave a symposium today to discuss what they’re going to do with their cash to make the world economy sing on key again.”Now the men and one woman in charge of some of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, the huge pools of state-controlled cash that have rescued American and European banks from their own mistakes in recent months, took to the Davos stage to defend their intentions,” the Times reported from the scene.Their intentions… hm… the world finance edifice is relying more than ever before on money controlled by politicians, sheiks, party functionaries and government bureaucrats. True, those people are well-aligned with those who control the “free” marketplace, but there’s a big difference between being bailed out by a world financial institution on the one hand or the government of Romania on the other. I’m only using that as an example. Romania is not bailing anybody out at this point, if ever. The apparently opposite trend came from a very upbeat Bill Gates, who introduced the idea of “creative capitalism,” in which that very same global free market system would benefit the poor as well as the rich. Somewhere in the stew they are serving at Davos is a link between the growing importance of state-controlled capital and the creation of an international system by which the markets that are increasingly reliant on that capital come together to make the entire world a better place.Thank God I’m not smart enough to see it.