The Wall Street Journal's Steve Gelsi took to the streets yesterday to solicit some thoughts about the crisis in the financial markets from people gathered outside the New York Stock Exchange. One of the people Gelsi chatted with was a young man named Bhusham Gupta, who said he works in the wealth management department at Citigroup and confessed that he feels "pretty" for the people who worked at Lehman Brothers who lost their jobs. First of all, Bhusham, you are pretty—don't ever let anyone tell you any different. And hats off to Citi CEO Vikram Pandit. Importing your brokers from India is a surefire way to keep your bank nimble during these lean times! Clip after the jump.

The painful cost-cutting at Citigroup continues. The company is now asking bankers and traders to refrain from making color copies and print out internal presentations on both sides of the page. Oh, and unless you're eating with a client, you can forget about expensing your lunch. The official word was sent out to Citi employees by John Havens, Citi's head of investment banking (left), two weeks ago. Thanks to Dealbook, you can gloss over the memo in its entirety after the jump.

• The merger market is experiencing its slowest August in 16 years. [Reuters]

• Obama now has a running mate. But now Joe Biden's son and brother are in the news over a hedge fund that went sour. [WaPo, Dealbook]

• Analysts are steeling themselves for a loss of as much as $1.8 billion when Lehman closes out the third quarter in a few weeks. [WSJ]

• The bill for the auction-rate securities mess is now adding up by the hour. Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, UBS, and Morgan Stanley have all contributed to to the tally. [Dealbook]

• Dan Och's Och-Ziff reported a net loss during the second quarter; the stock has been cut in half since its IPO last year. [Reuters, NYP]

• Ford announced an $8.7 billion loss for the second quarter—its worse ever—and an $8 billion write-down. [NYT]

Remember when Citigroup paid $400 million to name the Mets' new ballpark Citi Field for the next 20 years? So will Citi's ongoing troubles change anything? "Losses or not, there is no stopping the Citi Field deal, even if some of its laid-off employees may not be able to afford to take their families to a game, or even if some of them could have been retained with the $20 million a year being spent on baseball." [NYT]

• Merrill Lynch's $4.65 billion second-quarter loss was almost twice what analysts had predicted; the firm also wrote down an additional $9.5 billion in connection with subprime losses. [Bloomberg]

• Lehman Brothers is said to be weighing a plan to take the firm private. [NYP]

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

• Anheuser-Busch will reject InBev's $46.4 billion takeover bid. [Reuters]

• Ten percent of Citi's investment banking division will lose their jobs in the coming weeks. [Bloomberg]

When massive corporations decide to come up with a new slogan, they almost always end up with something short, trite, and massively expensive. Citigroup just unveiled its earth-shaking new slogan "Citi Never Sleeps," which is a reworking of its classic "The Citi Never Sleeps" tagline. But didn't they just spend $30 million last year launching a different slogan? Well yes, but that one didn't work out, because it sounded like it came straight from the mouth of bottom-rung redneck comedian Larry the Cable Guy. Derisive laughter is appropriate here:

Shares of San Francisco-based Visa jumped more than 30 percent today in the largest initial public offering in U.S. history. Visa issued 406 million shares at $44 each to raise almost $18 billion. More than half of the IPO take is going to its shareholder banks, which include Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. Convenient: While the IPO has long been planned, the cash will come in handy right now. (Photo by AP/Richard Drew)

• The real deal behind the noise levels at East Village bar Heathers. [NYO/The Real Estate]