What do you do when your career on Wall Street has come to an ignominious end and you need to keep busy lest you end up spending the rest of your days playing bridge or golf? Take a job in academia! Greg Fleming, the former president of Merrill Lynch, is now a member of the Yale Law School faculty: This semester, he's teaching a class that will explain the "economic events of the past year," which should also help Fleming shed some light on what exactly he was doing as the man in charge of risk management at Merrill Lynch the past few years. Fleming isn't the only one.

• More than 2.6 million jobs were lost in 2008, the most since World War II ended in 1945. The unemployment rate now stands at 7.2 percent. [CNN]
• Steve Rattner may be Barack Obama's car czar, assuming several potential conflicts of interests are sorted out. [ABC, NYP]
• Hedge funds lost 18.3 percent on average in 2008 [DB]
• Merrill Lynch exec Gregory Fleming is headed off to teach at Yale. [DB]
• Dick Parsons says he has no plans to become Commerce Secretary. [DB]
• Sometimes there is justice in this world: Marc Rich was a victim of Bernie Madoff, too, and lost $10-15 million as part of the scheme. [BN]
• Bernie Madoff's home in the south of France is actually fairly modest. [BN]

♦ Yesterday's sell-off is expected to continue today. [WSJ]
♦ Even Goldman Sachs is cutting. The firm plans to cut 10 percent of its 32,000 employees. [WSJ]
♦ The glory days of hedge funds are over, as you're probably aware. [NYT]
♦ Credit Suisse reported a $1.08 billion loss during the third quarter. [DB]
♦ The inquiry into the financial crisis on Capitol Hill continues. Today's guest piñata will be Alan Greenspan. [NYT]