• The last-minute rejection of the auto bailout yesterday has pretty much guaranteed that this will be a miserable day on Wall Street. [NYT, WSJ]
• Marc Dreier, the lawyer accused of stealing hundreds of millions from investors, was denied bail yesterday. The Post suggests "suicide hotlines in Greenwich could be lit up today as investors begin to realize how much they've lost in the rip-off scheme." [NYT, NYP]
• U.S. retail sales dropped 1.8 percent last month. [WSJ]
• Goldman Sachs has set aside $12 billion for bonuses, down from $20 billion last year. [Reuters]
• Bonuses on Wall Street are expected to be down 50 percent this year. [DB]
• Good news for ex-Merrill CEO Stan O'Neal: He may have a new job. [FIN]

Bank of America has confirmed that it plans to cut 30,000 to 35,000 jobs over the next three years to "eliminate redundancies created as a result of the merger with Merrill Lynch and to reflect the current recessionary environment." Happy Thursday! [NYT, press release]

• The House approved the auto bailout bill yesterday; what will happen when it gets to the Senate is still up in the air. [NYT]
• The number of Americans filing new unemployment insurance claims last week jumped to a 26-year high. [CNN]
• Stocks slipped in early trading as investors waited to see if the auto bailout gets Senate approval, and because of discouraging economic data. [CNN]

Hedge fund titan Cliff Asness is not a happy camper today. The founder of AQR Capital (and a man once described as one of the smartest guys in the business) is firing back at Dealbreaker.com for reporting on his firm's losses and suggesting he'd fired his own secretary, as well as at former employees of his fund, who appear to have been ripping him to pieces in anonymous comments: "The internet's a great place for anonymous ignorant fools who feel like tough guys in the know when they post their verbal vomit. Enjoy your fun while it lasts. When we go back to doing great for clients what are you going to do for fun? Well, whatever, I'm sure it will be dishonorable and cowardly." [Dealbreaker]

♦ Congressional Democrats and the Bush administration are in the final stages of negotiating an auto bailout package. A vote in the House is expected as soon as Wednesday afternoon. [NYT]
♦ Bad news for GMAC: The auto and consumer lender failed to secure additional financial and will not be able to transition to a bank holding company. [CNNMoney]
♦ Yahoo! is expected to hand out 1,500 pink slips today. [CNN]

Let us not, at this crucial moment, forget how much shit the Tribune Co. is in. Executives at the Tribune Co. are quite literally wading to work today through rivers of bad news—deep, deep rivers. Yesterday they freaking went bankrupt. Today they find themselves smack dab in the middle of Gov. ROD BLAGOJEVICH's outrageous corruption scandal—because gnomish asshole Tribune CEO Sam Zell allegedly agreed in principle to fire a troublesome editorial page editor in exchange for $100 million in state money. Obvious question: Did Blago's corrupt scheme help drive Tribune into bankruptcy? We examine THE FACTS for you below!

That was quick. This morning, Merrill Lynch chief John Thain was lobbying for a $10 million bonus. By the early afternoon, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo had sent off a letter denouncing the idea. Now CNBC is reporting that Thain has relented and has accepted his bonus-less fate. He's not the only one. CNBC also reports that Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack won't be getting one either.

♦ Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain is tangling with the bank's board over a $10 million annual bonus he says he deserves for "saving" the firm and selling it to Bank of America. [Reuters]
♦ Ken Griffin's Citadel is closing up shop in Tokyo. [Bloomberg]
♦ UBS may be planning to shed another 4,500 jobs. [DB]
♦ Sam Zell's Tribune Co. has retained Lazard to assist the company with a possible bankruptcy filing. [WSJ]
♦ The outlook is increasingly grim for Wesley Edens' Fortress Investment Group: Shares have gone down more than 90 percent this year. [NYP]
♦ Plenty of problems also face Leon Black and his Apollo Management. [NYT]
♦ But it's been a good year for hedge fund manager Jim Chanos, despite the whole Ashley Dupre thing. [NYM]
♦ Stocks are expected to gain big today with the news of an auto bailout. [CNN]

William Cohan, the banker-turned-author who published The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co. last year, has a few details on just how much Bruce Wasserstein's investment banking firm is making off the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. For advising Bryan Marsal, the turnaround guru who is now running what's left of Lehman, Lazard is collecting $400,000 a month for the next two years (and then $150,000 a month thereafter). But there's more: Lazard is also getting a $5 million fee for the week's worth of work it did in September advising Lehman on the sale of its headquarters at 750 Seventh Avenue to Barclays. Wasserstein is also expected to receive another $5 million for its efforts to sell Lehman's investment-management businesses, including Neuberger Berman. And there's good reason to assume that Wasserstein is sitting back right now smiling at his current circumstances, says Cohan:

Donald Trump is currently getting sued by Deustche Bank for refusing to pay $40 million on a loan that he personally guaranteed. He's probably having some (relative) money troubles. But none of this is his fault! Which is why he is countersuing the bank for $3 billion. It's really the least they can do to make up for their wanton persecution of Donald Trump:

♦ A bruising day in the markets is expected to follow the scary job news this morning: Employers slashed 533,000 jobs last month, making it the most jobs lost in a single month since December of 1974. [CNN]
♦ Merrill Lynch shareholders will vote on the bank's merger with Bank of America today. [DB]
♦ Things are getting worse for hedge fund king Ken Griffin: His Citadel Investment Group was down another 13% in November. [WSJ]
♦ Neel Kashkari says the TARP is working; he and Hank Paulson may be the only ones. [Bloomberg]
♦ Citi has closed on the sale of its German subsidiary to Credit Mutuel-CIC for $6.6 billion. [MW]

Rahm Emanuel, as we all know, was Bill Clinton's political enforcer, and then he was a Congressman, and now he's Barack Obama's new Chief of Staff. The end. But wait, there was this part, in between Clinton and Congress, when Rahm was doing... something else? Turns out he was working for an investment bank. Scary!

♦ Layoff announcements, grim unemployment data, and dismal retail sales figures should lead to another nasty trading session on Wall Street. [CNN]
♦ A group of managers and senior execs from Neuberger Berman won the auction to take over Lehman's money management business. [NYT]
♦ Credit Suisse is laying off 5,300 people. [Reuters]
♦ Citigroup's top execs like Vikram Pandit and Bob Rubin say they're willing to forgo annual bonuses. How generous of them! [FT]
♦ Thomas H. Lee may shut down two hedge funds it launched recently. [WSJ]
♦ Poor Steve Schwarzman is "knocking on more doors and pressing more flesh than ever" to get business done these days. [NYP]
♦ Fortress Investment Group is falling apart fast. [NYT]
♦ Carlyle Group LLC is cutting 10 percent of its staff. [WSJ]

Leave it to the Fox Business Channel to figure out a way to tie the Plaxico Burress brouhaha to the economy at large, but the network managed to pull off just such a feat yesterday when a business reporter turned up to list off 5 people who shot themselves in the foot over the past year. Coming in at No. 5 on the list: Blackstone founder Steve Schwarzman, who made the list for the lavish 60th birthday party he held last year, not surprisingly. "This guy is crazy!" the reporter explains to anchor David Asman when he asks why Schwarzman made the list.

♦ Detroit's Big Three automakers presented new turnaround plans (and their request for $34 billion) to Congress yesterday. [WSJ, Bloomberg]
♦ Merrill Lynch plans to cut year-end bonuses in half. [Bloomberg]
♦ Now that it's turned itself into a commercial bank, Goldman Sachs is thinking about starting an online banking operation, too. [DB]
♦ Goldman is tapping Gerald Corrigan, a former head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to serve as chairman of its bank holding company. [FT]
♦ Billionaire financier face-off: One of Carl Icahn's companies is suing a firm owned by Leon Black. [NYT, NYP]
♦ Ramius Capital, the struggling hedge fund operated by Peter Cohen, is closing four of its funds. [WSJ]

What's this—monetary distress for Donald Trump, the richest man in the universe? Trump is being sued by Deutsche Bank for failing to pay off a loan for his new Chicago high rise tower, which he personally guaranteed to the tune of $40 million. That makes it a great time to raise the perpetual question, "How much is Trump really worth?" A safe guess: far less than he was the last time anybody took the trouble to calculate:

If you see a bunch of glum-looking tellers tomorrow at your local Washington Mutual branch, there's a good reason for that: JPMorgan announced this afternoon that it plans to slash 20 percent of the bank's work force, or 9,200 jobs, following its acquisition of the bank in September. [CNN]

If your boyfriend happens to work on Wall Street, don't expect him to be in the mood for much romance this evening. The Dow dropped another 680 points today and it seems all the negative economic news is now taking a toll in the bedroom. Experts say that stress, depression and anxiety related to the economic crisis has led to a sharp drop in mens' libido. One couple that was once doing the deed four times a week? They've only had sex once since the "economy went soft," reports the Post. "A man's sexual apparatus is very delicate. If something is wrong, it is very difficult for men to get or maintain an erection," says Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who probably knows about these issues more than anyone else, especially since she's old enough to have been dishing out sex advice during the Great Depression.

♦ The Big Three automakers are putting finishing touches on new business plans to take to Congress this week, part of a last-ditch effort to secure a federal bailout. [WSJ, Bloomberg, NYT]
♦ Shoppers spent $41 billion over the four-day weekend, up 7.2 percent from the year before. That was better than expected, but retail experts are still pessimistic about the holiday season outlook. [CNNMoney, WSJ]
♦ Hedge funder Paul Tudor Jones has suspended withdrawals as he splits his $10 billion flagship fund into two. [FT]
♦ The bailout has already cost more than World War II, in case you're keeping count at home. [Clusterstock]

It turns out the news media had a pretty shameful weekend. A British couple came forward to say that while they were hiding from terrorists at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai, CNN broadcast details of their specific hiding place in the facility, resulting in a fresh search by the gunmen in control of the hotel at the time. The Indian government blacked out local TV after claiming the terrorists were gaining tactical information from the broadcasts. And now David Carr weighs in via the Times with a column about how U.S. newspapers were complicit in whipping shoppers into the frenzy that culminated in a deadly Wal-Mart stampede: