See, statistics say the "Fitness" field will grow by a quarter by 2016. How much of that growth will be from laid-off corporate types? The New York Times has no idea, but they found several anecdotes to create the appearance of a full-on exodus!

One equities lady became a yoga instructor, at a salary of $20K. Hardly a sound financial decision! A stock trader opened a personal training place in Jersey. A former healthcare executive is organizing "ultradistance" races out of his basement. A lady went to Harvard, then quit a lawyer job to teach yoga.

Ironclad!

Not only is this trend fabricated, but even if it were real, it stands to reason that it would collapse immediately. If people can't make money working for Wall Street, do we expect them to flourish as personal trainers, one of the things that any smart person would immediately cut from their budget during a recession? No. The future of recession fitness is obviously this:

Summary: This message provides you with important information about the
2009 Offering of the Employee Stock Purchase Plan. The enrollment period
starts on December 1.
You will get more details before the start of the enrollment period on
December 1.

Dear Colleague,

I am pleased to announce that the Board of Directors has approved an
offering of the Employee Stock Purchase Plan for 2009. What's more, the
plan is enhanced for the coming year. The purchase price will be 85% of
the average market price at the beginning or the end of the offering,
whichever is lower. As many of you will be aware, this is a significant
change from last year's offering.

Whether participation in the 2009 Offering is a good deal for you, depends
on your personal financial situation, you future financial objectives and
your tolerance for risk, since investing in any stock includes an element
of risk. All the same, please consider your opportunity to participate in
the 2009 Offering carefully; it does provide eligible employees with a
convenient way to buy Company stock at a discount.*

You will receive details about the 2009 Offering before December 1,
including the Base Prospectus, 2009 Appendices, the Annual Report on Form
10-K for 2007 and enrollment instructions. Please look for an e-mail
message with links to supporting materials on the Company's intranet soon.

The Company is very pleased to extend this opportunity to our employees. We
encourage you to give careful consideration to participating in the 2009
Offering.

Thanks,

Dave Norton
Senior Vice President, Human Resources

* A reminder to excluded employees who are eligible for the Supplemental
Retirement and Investment Plan (the Company-offered 401(k) plan):
Participants in SRIP will receive a portion of the Company match in the
form of Company stock starting in 2009.

[Stock's up today!]

• It is "half the value of everything produced in the nation last year," according to Bloomberg.
• It's enough to cut a check for almost $25,000 to every single citizen of the USA!
• If you had 7.4 trillion pennies, you would have $74,000,000,000. That's enough money to buy the New York Times Co. 86 times over. If we say that 100 pennies stack up 4 inches high, 7.4 trillion pennies would stack up 4,671,717 miles high. That's enough to go to the moon and back ten times.

Fun with math! If you think the US media is equipped to evaluate numbers like this precisely, you're out of your mind. Even the media outlets that are most qualified to report on money matters have a hard time putting $1 trillion into perspective (try this: "It would take almost three decades to spend a trillion dollars at $1,000 per second"), much less $7.4 trillion.

If it makes you feel better though: this financial crisis has actually erased $23 trillion in corporate value. So 7.4 tril isn't too bad! [Bloomberg]

In one sense, it's wise for the company to cut the dividend, because it needs to conserve all the cash it can get. But it's pretty apocalyptic for its stock, because it just makes it that much more unattractive to investors.

The company also released its October revenues just minutes ago. How are those? Horrible! Total revenues are down 9.4% from last year, and ad revenues are down more than 16%.

National advertising revenues decreased as weakness in the studio entertainment, healthcare and home furnishing manufacturer categories offset very strong growth in financial services advertising as well as increased advocacy advertising.

Yes, all those full-page ads by failing banks desperate to retain their customers were the bright spot for the NYT Co.

So here's the question: How long until the NYT Co. declares bankruptcy? "Never" is an acceptable answer for the optimists among you. A sale by the Sulzberger family is another obvious alternative. For the more hard-hearted, put your predictions in the comments. There will be some sort of reward for the winner. Though nobody really "wins" if it actually happens.

They problem is that in this country, CEOs are only too happy to trade the scorn of the public for a pile of money. Most Americans would do the same! (Unless the revolution comes, in which case it's up against the wall with all of you). So you can bitch all you want about golden parachutes that can top $100 million for executives who didn't do shit except lose shareholder money the entire time they were employed, but that CEO will chuckle to himself, have his flack issue a statement, and then go enjoy his millions and millions of free dollars on a private island somewhere, full of untold numbers of prostitutes.

So America has worked out its own ways to humiliate these CEOs without their consent. The media trumpets their salaries all over the place, hollering louder about them the worse their company does. Their kids are shunned and forced to go to special, expensive schools. Actually, nobody sympathizes with CEOs except for other CEOs, and politicians.

Now, however, every company is doing poorly. So our system for determining what executives to focus our class rage upon is broken. The American public is spread too thin. That's why we need to import some sort of Japanese-style public shaming ceremony here. CEOs can apologize for their sins and wallow in misery, we can all enjoy the schadenfreude, and then we can all focus our allotment of hatred where it belongs: on Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. And the CEOs will join us.

America is unity!

Cuban's basic defense: Yes, I sold a bunch of stock after the CEO of a company I partially owned told me confidential, nonpublic information that I knew would hurt the stock price. But I never agreed to keep the information confidential, so there! Then he says (through his lawyer) that the CEO of said company is full of shit because he can't even remember the conversation. They posted this excerpt of an interview with the CEO:

1) Q- We spoke earlier about you were telling Mr. Cuban in words or substance : “I have confidential information for you”.

A- Right.

2) Q- Do you recall anything Mr. Cuban said in response or reply to that statement by you ?

A- No, I do not.

Then they insinuate that the SEC's timing of the lawsuit is fishy. So there you have it: everyone is conspiring against Mark Cuban. We will continue to watch with an open mind.

[WSJ. And I know nothing about the law, but doesn't this defense sound strange on a logical level? You're not allowed to sell stock on inside information, but if you didn't agree not to do it, then you can? Any lawyers in the house here?]

The Journal describes Emanuel as being "combative with a business audience." He wouldn't say they'll give the unions everything the unions want, but he wouldn't say they wouldn't either. He pinned the blame squarely on the assembled corporate types, of course, for fucking over the middle class for twenty years.

"When it gets rough out there, a lot of business leaders get out of the car and say, 'We're OK with minor reform.' I'm challenging you today, we're going to have to do big, serious things," Rahm Emanuel said, speaking to The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council, a conference convened to elicit corporate opinion on the challenges facing the new president.

AND:

Mr. Emanuel promised that a major economic stimulus would be "the first order of business" for Mr. Obama when he takes office Jan. 20. The focus of spending will be on infrastructure, specifically "green infrastructure," which he said would include mass transit, upgraded electricity transmission lines, "smart" electrical meters that allow consumers to save money by using electricity at off-peak hours, and universal broadband Internet access, which he said would encourage telecommuting.

Hooray, hard-charging enforcer Rahm is telling off those fatcats! The rest of the Obama team is not so aggressive, but this seems as good a window as any into what the first couple honeymoon months of the Obama presidency will be like. Soak the rich! However few of them remain! We demand blood! Or at least health insurance, that'd work too!

• Personal: Crazy divorces! Perelman's been divorced three times. He met his third wife, Patricia Duff, when they were both still married. They had a child together before they were married. A year later they were going through a nasty public divorce! "The court psychiatrist found Duff to be paranoid and narcissistic and Perelman to have serious anger management issues, Perelman caught a great deal of flak for testifying that it cost about $3 a day to feed his daughter, and both sides alleged physical abuse by the other party." That's bad. Perelman told Duff at the time, “I will destroy you, and I will enjoy it.”

  Then there was his dramatic marriage to and divorce from actress Ellen Barkin. Perelman once got mad when she did a movie sex scene with Laurence Fishburne. He was a narcissistic, controlling guy. Eventually they got divorced, and he gave her between $20-60 million. But he moved on quickly!

• Business: Perelman is a billionaire investor who got a reputation as a corporate raider way back in the 1980s. (He learned from his businessman dad, who made little Ron sit in on board meetings at age 12 and yelled at him and made him an angry young loner). Several times in his career he was accused of "greenmail," which means buying up enough shares of a company to scare the company into paying him a lot of money to go away. He made tens of millions in this way, which is great for Ron Perelman, and terrible for shareholders.

  Another fun thing was when he had one public company he controlled pay him four times market value for his shares in another company. Later he was forced to undo this because, you know, you're not allowed to take money from everybody else in order to buy holdings from yourself at wildly inflated prices.

  Another time, in a contract dispute lawsuit, an employee named Fred Tepperman "charged that the breakfast meetings [with Perelman] were nothing but a podium Perelman used to boast about his sexual conquests, and thus Tepperman was merely avoiding pointless meetings, as any worker would." Ha.

• And: Clinton operative Vernon Jordan tried to get Perelman to give a job to Monica Lewinsky at Revlon, a company Perelman got in one of the nastiest corporate takeovers in history. Then the Lewinsky scandal broke and Perelman's name was all over it, hilariously.

Stay tuned for more! Every time someone seeks out the advice on how not to get slimed in the press, it only reminds us of why they need the help.

Mark Cuban would be just another rich guy except for his penchant for saying whatever pops into his head. He constantly criticizes the NBA, which is a no-no by owners. The flipside is he gets great PR. Although half of it is bad! Oh well. He also has a blog that is sometimes hilarious and not well thought out a bit.

At the moment, Cuban wants to buy the Chicago Cubs from Tribune Co., which needs to sell the storied baseball franchise to raise cash, which it will burn in a vain attempt to save its newspapers. The idea of Cuban—a maverick—owning the Cubs absolutely kills traditionalists, who think he would totally ruin all the great Chicago traditions, such as having ivy on the outfield walls and losing constantly.

So is it possible that there was some shady conspiracy that caused this allegation from 2004 to surface just in time to (likely) torpedo any chance Cuban has of buying the Cubs? You would have to be a crazy conspiracy freak to believe this, for which there is no evidence whatsoever, so please don't sue us.

Obama's people have been repeating the mantra "One president at a time" over and over, like some sort of magic political talisman. Barack has no desire to get too involved at the moment, because politically that would mean taking on lot of responsibility without technically having any power.

And Bush is just sleepwalking through his last few months. He's not just a lame duck, he's a lame duck who everyone despises. He couldn't get anything accomplished even if he wanted to. Which he doesn't. He wants to play with Barney and keep quiet enough to maybe land that Commissioner of Baseball gig a few years down the line.

Neither of those things would be all that bad if we weren't mired in a financial crisis of epic proportions. Because when a crisis happens somebody has to be in charge. And if Bush isn't, and Barack isn't, you know who is? Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson! John Crudele has already taken to referring to him as "de facto president of the US." Which is not too far off the mark!

And hey, maybe it's not such a bad thing to have a guy like Paulson in charge of all the most important decisions, considering they're in his field of expertise? Psht! This is the same guy whose original idea for solving this mess was to give all power to the Treasury to do whatever it wanted, with no challenges permitted. Paulson changed the focus of the bailout package for the third time yesterday. Third time! It doesn't inspire confidence, nor should it.

In conclusion, our fake-elected bad president has no desire or incentive to do anything. Our actual president-elect: the same, until January. Our de facto president is incentivized and predisposed to focus solely on helping Wall Street. And everyone's money is disappearing in the meantime. Also, Iran.

Hope nothing bad happens for the next three months!

The sale of drawings from the Fulds' collection, including three Willem de Koonings, was announced a few days after Lehman declared bankruptcy in September. The Fulds still own a sizable art collection and five homes, including a $21m Manhattan apartment.

Remember how earlier this year we thought Dick Fuld got knocked out in the company gym, but it turned out that it probably didn't happen? Well now he has an extra $20 million. Hm.

[Guardian UK]

The Post says reporters and finance people alike were pissed yesterday because he only answered two or three questions, and those with "a tone of impatience." And how do you expect to excite the markets with a speech like this?:

On Friday, November 7 we published a new notice for financial agents to serve as asset managers for the equity, warrants and senior debt issued to the Treasury by financial institutions participating in the CPP. This solicitation is open to all entities that meet minimum qualifications and responses are due within six days on Thursday, November 13 at 5pm.

What you need are some public speaking tips, Neel. Pay attention:

1. Maintain eye contact. (Should not be a problem for you.)

2. Smile! (May in fact be a problem for you.)

3. Lay out a plan that will stabilize our financial institutions and energize our credit markets without unduly rewarding the leadership of banks and other lenders who plunged recklessly into risky loans, while turning a long-term profit for the taxpayer.

Good luck!

I have dedicated my life to this football team
And I will do anything to help it win.
- Bernie Kosar

You know it baby! Bring back Rush, Neel! The salvation of the Dow Jones Industrial Average depends on it!

[Top pic by commenter ineffable.me]

For example, one of our sources has heard that most major university endowments (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc.) are down 25%-30% on a mark-to-market basis. Harvard is also reportedly trying to dump 1/3 of its private equity holdings to raise cash, which would be a seriously distressed move.

As a matter of fact Harvard—which has an endowment of almost $37 billion—is selling off $1.5 billion in private equity holdings, about a third of its total. And market rate now is only about 50% of their face value, meaning they are in serious need of cash. [And don't go too heavy on the schadenfreude, Harvard rivals; Clusterstock also hears that "a rumor is circulating that Columbia's endowment fund is illiquid [can't raise the cash it needs to fund current commitments]."]

What does it all mean? First of all, welcome to capitalism, Harvard students! Perhaps the young Marxists will finally start winning arguments with the B-school students in the lunchroom. Second, the school will have to cut back somewhere—major budget areas like new construction could get hacked. And maybe some of Harvard's notoriously generous financial aid, too! And yes, you teachers may have to actually confront students, in a classroom. Scary!

We've heard no rumors of this sort about Florida State University. Just something to consider. [Clusterstock]

The Wall Street Journal's analysis: "glum readings of service sector activity and employment" combined with a generally poor economic outlook combined with hedge funds selling off holdings to raise cash in anticipation of investors pulling their money out.

The quick and dirty Yahoo Finance analysis: "The decline was driven by profit taking, and discouraging economic data on employment and the services sector."

Our analysis: a bunch of real suckers went wild yesterday buying stuff up cause they love Obama. Now it's settling in that hey, he won't even be in office for another three months and even when does get there, he still has to deal with the same shitty economy we have today. So then they all were like, "Sell!"

Or maybe they're all Republicans.

"Obviously, I wouldn't have wanted to do that and become, you know, some kind of symbol of sorts of that period of time," Schwarzman lamented yesterday at a conference in New York. "Who would ever wish that on themselves? No one."

I think that sort of thing means a lot to, you know, not only the poor, but also the people who bought into Blackstone's IPO last year when the stock was at 35. Who are also now the poor.

[Pic via NYO]

With 15 minutes left in the trading day yesterday, Dow Jones ran a mistaken report that (almost singlehandedly) erased the day's gains in the DJ Industrial Average:

General Electric's stock fell 4 percent in the last minutes of trading, only to end down 1.5 percent at $19.20.

Dow Jones reported that General Electric's Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt said GE aims at keeping 2009 profits at the same level as this year, even if revenue drops 10 percent to 15 percent.

But after the closing bell, Dow Jones corrected their story, saying that GE Chief Executive Jeff Immelt had not forecast 2009 profit to be flat.

The news service said Immelt had been speaking hypothetically when he told a business group in Spain that he would ask his managers to maintain profits even if revenues at their businesses fell as much as 10 percent to 15 percent.

That's from Reuters, and there are plenty of other reports in dozens of other outlets about this major reporting screwup. So, what does the Wall Street Journal—the flagship paper of Dow Jones—have to say this morning about yesterday's late selloff in the market?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished down 74.16 points, or 0.8%, at 8990.96. It was up more than 290 points and down nearly 175 points within the last 15 minutes of trading.

General Electric was a catalyst in the late-day swoon, finishing down 1.5%.

The late-day market selloff reflected a "sell the rallies" mentality in the stock market, said Todd Steinberg, head of equities and derivatives for the Americas at BNP Paribas. After Tuesday's rally and gains Wednesday afternoon, "stocks got back up to levels where people were comfortable selling," he said.

We'll translate that: Nothing! The WSJ had nothing to say about how its own company's fuckup led to this rapid selloff of GE "in the late day swoon."

And that's how you try to sweep an error under the rug, unsuccessfully.

—-—-—-- Forwarded message —-—-—--
From: Georg von Sperling
Date: Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 8:26 PM
Subject: Googling my wife, I came across something that I'd like you to correct
To: gabriel@gawker.com

Hi Gabriel,

Thank you for taking the time to read this email. I was googling my wife, and came across this article posted on Gawker by Doree Shafrir.

Doree commented on my wife's name in some pretty crass terms. [Exact awesome quote: "okay, there's no fucking way that's not a made-up name, but whatever" -Ed] Any chance that could be corrected? Samantha's first name is certainly Samantha, and my last name is certainly mine.

So anyway, Doree. Samantha von Sperling is totally her actual real name. Glad we could clear that up.

Maybe Monday.

Portfolio's response to the crisis: meetings.

“We’ve had more meetings,” said the magazine’s editor, Joanne Lipman. “And one of the things we did is we made a list of every writer we had and what stories they’re working on, and asked how their pieces are relevant, and has the landscape changed in a way to reshape their stories.”

Fortune's response: get lucky.

Two weeks after Lehman Brothers went under, a blown-up picture of Henry Paulson’s face, looking not so smug, was plastered across the cover of the biweekly Fortune with the cover line: “Paulson to the Rescue.” On Oct. 23, an image of former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg in sunglasses took the cover, weeks after AIG went down...

“We had those sticks in the fire already, which was great,” said Andy Serwer, the managing editor of Fortune. “That was something in the works for a while and it fell into place perfectly.”

Forbes' response: Look really hard at whatever you have on the cover; think deeply; concoct a tenuous explanation that could theoretically connect said cover and the current crisis.

And Forbes, a biweekly, is now at newsstands with a cover portrait of a man in a hard hat, which is a tie-in to their annual feature on the 200 Best Small Companies.

“If you look at the cover—it combines the elements of the best small-business review and a look at the economy and looks where we’re going,” said Bill Baldwin, Forbes’ editor.

We understand. We're lazy too. [NYO]

SOME OF NEEL KASHKARI'S FAVORITE QUOTES:

A modern day warrior
Mean mean stride
Today's Tom Sawyer
Mean mean pride.

- Rush

She was a hit machine
She kept her motor clean
She was the best darn woman that I ever seen.

- AC/DC

I have dedicated my life to this football team
And I will do anything to help it win.

- Bernie Kosar

Iraq will not be allowed to annex Kuwait.
That's not a threat. That's not a boast.
That's just the way it's going to be.

-President George Bush

All the world's indeed a stage
And we are merely players...

-"Rush/ Shakespeare"

So far, Cramer's been "pilloried" more for the calls that he definitively got wrong, and for being a huge bull in general right up until the bottom fell out of the market. The reaction to his "pull your money out" rant was more slack-jawed amazement at how he could totally flip his entire investment philosophy without blinking. And, you know, at how he was about to cry. He may turn out to be right! We'll see in five years. I guess you can't expect him to know what the public thinks:

For his own part, Cramer insisted he ignores his legion of skeptics and haters. "I have not seen any of the Fox ads," he said. "You know why? For the same reason that I haven't read a blog about me in years; I haven't read an article about me in years. Because you know what? I gotta do my job."

Some are sucking it up and pressing on, regardless of the hardships:

Ms. Sturtevant, [an Oppenheimer & Co. investment director and] a mother of four, is training for her fourth marathon. With brokerage clients needing more hand-holding, she said, she stints on sleep rather than skip her 5 a.m. daily boot camp and 20-mile weekend runs.

Other wealthies are not so fortunate; their body fat percentages may be suffering in this downturn.

Her trainer, Chris Hall, chides Ms. David to make time and, when she does, to tune out her BlackBerry, she reported. “But I say, ‘You don’t understand — there’s 27,000 reasons I have to pay attention,’ ” referring to her accounts.

To help the selfless brokers, rich-person gyms are cutting fees and reaching out to those wealthy individuals in need. Still, some condo-dwellers are forced to suffer the ultimate indignity:

Since leaving a Midtown law firm in June to work at a nonprofit in Harlem, she’s been using her apartment building’s spartan fitness room. “When there are only three treadmills, it can get crowded pretty quickly,” she said.

“I’m lucky if I get in 20 minutes instead of the hour I used to do,” Ms. Shemin Feingold said. “My pants are getting tight. I’m going to have to figure out a new routine, because I can’t afford a new wardrobe.”

Cheer up, plutocrats. There's one workout that can be done with an old truck axle and two sandbags:

[Ratings are on a 1-10 scale—with 10 being the best—and are based on how much the media person or outlet has benefited from the crisis, how right they've been, and how much influence they've had.]

WINNERS

• Paul Krugman, NYT: Yea, he just won the Nobel Prize, okay? [10]
• Robert Thomson, WSJ: Thomson led the WSJ's recent redesign and re-imagination—which proved perfect for the big, scary headlines necessary over the last month. [9]
• Joe Nocera, NYT, and Bethany McLean, Fortune: Scored roughly a million-dollar deal to write the "definitive" book about the crisis. These two are certainly qualified to do it, but still—lucky bastards. [9]
• Maria Bartiromo, CNBC: The Money Honey is still the public face of CNBC, which owned this crisis top to bottom. [8]
• Lionel Barber, FT: Editor of the paper that's been consistently serious enough for long enough not to make anyone wonder about its political motives when the crisis went down. [8]
• Andrew Ross Sorkin, NYT: Wunderkind M&A reporter and Dealbook chief who is just everywhere. He got a shitload of money for a book. [8]
• Steve Liesman, CNBC: Senior economic reporter, and a man who's been getting way more face time with Wall Street big shots lately than their wives have. [8]
• John Gapper, FT: Chief business commentator at the solid pink paper, he's been admirably hard on the villains. [7]
• Charlie Rose, PBS: Landed a big interview with Warren Buffett—the last investor anybody trusts. [7]
• John Carney, Clusterstock: He left Dealbreaker in the midst of all this as possibly the most visible young, bloggin', new media name who actually knows what the hell is going on. [7]
• Felix Salmon, Portfolio: He's one of the better finance bloggers and has managed to stay on top of the crisis consistently, when not working on 12,000 word analyses of the Gawker pay structure. [6]
• Daniel Gross, Newsweek: Maybe smartest of all, plans a "quickie electronic book" to be published before the end of the year. Do less work, get out first, heyo! [6]

LOSERS

• Fox Business Network: Yes, the little network finally got a measurable audience because of the crisis, and yes, they go to throw some decent shots at Jim Cramer. But the comparison to CNBC just makes them look bad. [4]
• Charlie Gasparino, CNBC: Got a lot of airtime as a talking head, which is good for him. Was working on a book about reckless leaders at Wall Street firms like Bear Stearns before Bear Stearns collapsed, which could mean a lot of pain in the ass rewriting. Comes off as a bit of wingnut by trying to pin the whole meltdown on Obama. [4]
• Andrea Mitchell, NBC: Trying to report while being married to Alan Greenspan, one of the guys most responsible for this whole thing. Ha. Time to retire, maybe? [3]
• Book Publishers: Who's going to buy all these books? [2]
• Jim Cramer, CNBC: Gave intermittently terrible advice, then made it worse when he tried to correct it. Overly emotional, which is not the thing people want in a money manager. See a roundup of his whole weird year here. [1]

HBO. Crate & Barrel. Brooks Brothers. Denny's. Equinox. Even Mary-fucking-Poppins. All are running recession-themed ads, like some ill-informed country relative who fills all awkward pauses by repeating what they saw the other day on the tee-vee.

For instance, television commercials from the Walt Disney Company, selling tickets for the Broadway musical “Mary Poppins,” feature members of the audience who make remarks like, “You think of everything going on in the world, and it just becomes magic” and “So well worth the money, and the uplifting of the spirit in these difficult times.”

Let's get together and fix this thing before it's too late, people. [pic via NYT]

• August, 2007: God damn Bernanke! Alan Greenspan! They have no idea how bad things are. No idea! (Wild rage).
• September, 2007: "The only thing I have is my authenticity."
• January, 2008: Cramer predicts Mike Bloomberg might buy the New York Times. Not yet!
• January, 2008: Cramer bet that financial stocks would outperform other sectors in 07. Lost bet.
• February, 2008: Barron's points out that Cramer's stock picks suck, factually speaking. Barron's reporters are banned from CNBC.
• March, 2008: Cramer nearly cries on TV because he was surprised Eliot Spitzer likes sex so much.
• March, 2008: Cramer tries to save Bear Stearns. Turns out he's not that influential.
• September, 2008: Jim Cramer was totally right in his initial crazy rant against Bernanke! Unfortunately he screamed so many things subsequently that everyone had forgotten about it by the time the markets crashed.
• October, 2008: But um, Cramer also recommended Wachovia stock as a "safe haven" for investors. That was very, very wrong.
• October, 2008: He got so upset he said fuck it, just put all your money under the mattress!
• October, 2008: Okay, back to normal!

• Say a big company has been working with a media seller for decades. Sorry dude: they know your weak company is broke. Pay up front. "If a client came in now that has been in the headlines wanting to do a deal to make customers feel good, you might ask for prepayment."
• "'The first quarter will be really scary,' said one media-agency executive, adding that it would be especially bad for TV."
• Local and national TV ad buys are down, which have indirectly already led to things like Sumner Redstone being forced to sell off $400 million in stock. Anybody scared here? "'It's really hard to argue that only part of the ad market's catching colds,' said Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Bernstein Research. 'It's really a scary time," he said, adding, "It's going to get worse.'"
• Also, you're fired. "Over the past week, several firms, including Starcom MediaVest, TBWA/Chiat/Day and Landor have issued pink slips to their workers."

But as long as the ad industry continues to crater, at least one reporter at the Wall Street Journal will have a job.

"The market is down, business is down, but we feel it less," said Dylan, 24, a promotional model-turned-Manhattan prostitute. "We're still busy. If men are horny, they're going to come in here."

Dylan works for a madam who runs a pair of brothels just north of Wall Street, where the going rate is $260 an hour, $160 for half. The madam says that that's all the market will bear right now: "The $1,000-an-hour girls are just not making it."

While the woman say their clients are still showing up, they're spending less time and money. "He used to spend at least an hour or two," Sienna says of a banker who's a regular. "Lately he's down to a half-hour, and he's no longer a big tipper."

Just when the story couldn't get any drearier, two of the madam's newest recruits turned to selling sex after the shit economy drove them out of more mainstream work.

"Shana, 42, lost her $45,000-a-year job as a secretary last year. Sienna [who's working on her graduate degree in English Lit] was laid off in July from her job as an executive assistant with a travel agency. Shana, who worked briefly as a waitress before hooking up with her current gig, is putting her son through college. 'He's trying to get an engineering degree,' she explained. 'With the economy the way it is, how is my son going to get a loan? And he's going to finish college.'" [NYDN]

[via NYO]

Dick Fuld: The CEO who destroyed Lehman Bros. What a dick, ha. He was a famously Type-A personality and hard charger till his firm crumbled to dust, thanks largely to his leadership. Then some angry employee knocked Fuld out at the company gym. Even mild-mannered Anderson Cooper blames Fuld in this video clip. You gotta admit, he looks worse than almost anyone right now.


Henry Paulson: Oh, Treasury Secretary Paulson. You picked a time to take your job. Every bad think in America is your fault! Your habit of walking around and looking grave failed to save the US economy. If Paulson could turn this whole thing around before he leaves office, he'd be a hero. But he can't, so he'll be a goat of historic proportions.


Alan Greenspan: Just this week the Times ran a devastating takedown of Greenspan's legacy. He was the Fed chairman for more than a decade, but got out just in time to miss this whole crisis. But in retrospect, Greenspan was obviously not the genius everyone thought. "The financial system as a whole has become more resilient," he remarked in 2004. Dude that was so wrong.


Christopher Cox: American hero John McCain thinks that SEC chairman Cox let the ship sink on his watch! According to McCain (watch the clip for a taste), Cox "betrayed the public" trust by doing nothing while short sellers and their devious brethren undermined the US economy.


Neel Kashkari: The 35-year-old former Goldman Sachs banker hasn't even started leading the government bailout plan, and already everyone is convinced he'll fail! They say he's too young, too inexperienced, too conflicted, and too bald. We'll overlook all that (at least until he has a couple weeks on the job), but the fact that he proudly declared himself "a free market Republican" is a wee bit scary.


George W. Bush: Sure, Bush is the natural guy to blame for all this. Why didn't he read the lessons of history from 1992, or 1976, or 1932, or one of many other years? But then you remember: he can't read. As much as we would all like to blame him, Bush is far too stupid to be responsible for something as complicated as this. Sigh.


Herbert and Marion Sandler: These two billionaires ran Golden West Financial, which did fabulously well in the mortgage business until, you know, all its mortgages blew up. By that time the company had been bought by Wachovia, which had to eat some major losses. Bill O'Reilly thinks they may be economic villains! Saturday Night Live made fun of them! They're pretty good stand-ins for all greedy mortgage lenders.


Alan Schwartz: He was the CEO who oversaw the collapse of Bear Stearns, the first big Wall Street firm to go down. He set this whole thing off! Here's a video of him on CNBC just days before BS failed, talking about how everything was okay. Some people think he lied about his firm's health.


Jim Cramer: The shouty CNBC financial "expert" used to be a big bull on the market. Buy stocks all the time, people! Then the market collapsed. Then he had to apologize and go on TV to tell everybody to pull their cash out of the market. Forget the losses! Abandon ship! He's pretty bad at money advice, ironically.


The Financial Media: Who allowed Cramer to stand up and give all his ruinous advice? Why didn't CNBC tell us this shit was coming? Why didn't the most prestigious financial papers in the country do some digging and tell us that all the people mentioned above were crooks who would eventually drain trillions from our coffers through incompetence or corruption? The answer, of course, is that the financial media gets caught up in the madness just like everyone else, and ends up telling us whatever we want to hear. Which is why you can't forget the final scapegoat in all this, who tends to go unnamed: