• More details about President Obama's plans to limit Wall Street pay are emerging. So is plenty of criticism. "I don't think the president should paint everyone with the same brush," says JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon. [BN, WSJ, BN]
• Wells Fargo has scrapped plans to host a employee conference in Las Vegas after the bank was pummeled with criticism. [WSJ]
• A dozen top bankers from Merrill-BofA have defected to Deutsche Bank. [TD]
• Lazard's fourth-quarter profits dropped by 50 percent. [DB]
• Daniel Och is doubling down on his hedge fund, Och-Ziff. [WSJ]
• Both Citigroup and the Mets say they're standing by their stadium plan. [NYP]
• Bloomberg LP is laying off staff. [Clusterstock]
• The House will hear testimony about Bernie Madoff today from Harry Markopolos, the investigator who tried to blow the whistle on him. [NYT]

The new guard consolidates its power at Bloomberg. Spotted: "Norman Pearlstine and a tableful of Bloomberg L.P. staffers toasting new boss Andy Lack at Le Cirque surrounded by Elke and Ben Gazzara, Gena Rowlands, Marty Richards, Rex Reed and Nancy O'Shaughessy." [Post]

♦ Gordon Gekko will live again: A sequel to Wall Street is in the works, although Michael Douglas has yet to sign on to the pic. [Variety]
♦ The downturn has been good for financial news sites: CNNMoney.com and BusinessWeek.com have both experience record growth. [WWD]
♦ The new issue of Rolling Stone is shorter and skinnier than issues past. [AP]
♦ Andy Lack, the former president of NBC News (and, more recently, the relatively unsuccessful CEO of Sony Music) is joining Bloomberg L.P. as CEO of the company's multimedia group. [NYO]

"Bloomberg LP, whose best-selling financial news and data terminals are ubiquitous on Wall Street, is trying to reassure jittery employees that it will weather the financial storm after the failure of one major client and the sale of another." [Post]

The Bloomberg financial newswire decided to update its 17-page Steve Jobs obituary today — and inadvertently published it in the process. Some investors were undoubtedly rattled to see, as our tipster did late this afternoon, the Apple CEO's obit cross the wire and then suddenly disappear. Jobs's battle with pancreatic cancer, and speculation over his health, jarred Wall Street earlier this year and continues to be the subject of speculation. The Times weighed in on the matter as recently as last month, when columnist Joe Nocera spoke with the secretive tech executive. But news organizations routinely prepare obituaries in advance, even for the healthy. And if Bloomberg readers had seen the internal story slug, "testjobs," their jitters might have abated. The obit, which we've obtained and reprinted after the jump, is a bit macabre to read but should not scare you out of your Apple shares. (UPDATE: Bloomberg has "retracted" its obituary, and the retraction is also after the jump.) More interesting are the accompanying notes for Bloomberg reporters!

You thought Mike was worth plenty as is? He's about to get richer. The price of a Bloomberg terminal goes up on December 1st. [Dealbreaker]

John Thain is about to free up a bit more capital for beleaguered Merrill Lynch: According to the Times, Merrill will sell its stake in Bloomberg L.P. "for about $4.5 billion, people briefed on the matter said Wednesday afternoon." [NYT]

• Dow Chemical will acquire rival specialty chemicals company Rohm & Haas for $18.8 billion, in a deal financed by Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway and the Kuwait Investment Authority. [Reuters]

• The Weather Channel was sold by Landmark Communications to NBC Universal, Bain Capital, and Blackstone for just under $3.5 billion. [NYT]

• Indian steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal is joining Goldman Sachs' board. [Bloomberg]

Michael Bloomberg is the greatest manager ever which is why pundits always want him to run for president. He's sooo great that he left an abusive tyrant in charge of his financial news company, and also that company gets sued every so often for being a hostile work environment for women. Last September, four women were suing Bloomberg LP for wrongful discrimination. Now, it's 58! It seems that whenever a lady employee became pregnant at Bloomberg, they were denied promotions and then received pay cuts. Mayor Mike always claims to have nothing to do at all with his company anymore, but the women filing the suit say he still calls the shots and "contributes to a culture of sexual discrimination." As there have been almost 500 women who've taken maternity leave from Bloomberg since 2002, the number of plaintiffs is expected to grow. And Mike himself is now writing a book about how to be as great a manager as he is. Like his last book, it will probably be ghost-written by his asshole-in-chief Winkler. [NYP]

The lil' ladies suing both Mayor Mike Bloomberg and his company Bloomberg LP for being discarded after they became pregnant have claimed they knew the Mayor talked regularly with Bloomberg's CEO—despite the wee helicopter-flying oligarch's loud protestations that he has nothing to do with the company. Oh guess what? "After a week of distancing himself from the company he founded and owns," says the Times, "Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday that he talked regularly to senior executives at the firm and was kept abreast of what was happening there." Please, can please everyone please not use "abreast" when writing about sex discrimination litigation please?

Looks like pointing the finger at Bloomberg LP corporate isn't going to save Mayor Mike from the sex discrimination suits breathing down his neck. The ladies suing his company for bias have now filed a complaint against the mayor himself for having "fostered, condoned and perpetuated" discrimination at the company. They also claim they've heard senior managers say that Mikey calls the Bloomberg CEO "all the time," which doesn't help the Mayor's shrugging "it's not my company" claim. Hmm. Did somebody say class-action lawsuit?

Other than a prolonged fascination with horses and pappy-signs-my-paycheck neuroses, we've always thought that Georgina and Emma Bloomberg were fairly well-adjusted. But we're starting to wonder how many sessions they've burned up with their therapists on Daddy Bloombucks' lady-hating ways. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced yesterday it will sue Bloomberg, L.P., the mayor's giant media and finance company, for demoting and cutting the pay of women at the company who took federally-protected maternity leave. Bloomberg distinguished himself yesterday (with some serious irritation!) from his eponymous company, telling reporters, "You'll have to talk to Bloomberg L.P. I haven't worked there, as you know, in an awful long time." But an overlooked 2001 story in the Village Voice contains pretty amazing excerpts from Bloomberg's 1998 deposition in a sexual harassment lawsuit; it was alleged that one of his executives had raped an employee.