Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman lost his high-profile proxy contest with Target last week, a defeat that reportedly led him to shed a tear or two when he spoke at the company's annual shareholders meeting. It was Ackman's decision to invoke the words of John F. Kennedy, though, that really ticked off New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera, who penned a blistering critique of Ackman's performance on Friday. So how did Ackman respond? He stayed up all night and composed a 5,000-word essay to explain himself: "The tear was not for the loss of a proxy contest as Mr. Nocera implies, but rather in recognition of the significance of JFK's words nearly 50 years ago. It may also have represented some amount of physical and emotional fatigue." Duly noted. [NYT]

More than 1,000 hedge fund managers gathered at Lincoln Center today for the Ira W. Sohn Investment Research Conference, an event that raises money for charity as well as gives other members of the industry a chance to gleam investment recommendations from some of the brightest financial geniuses around. (Those who paid the $3,000-per-person fee this year were treated to talks by the likes of Jim Chanos, Mark Kingdon, Stephen Mandel, Peter Schiff, and Peter Thiel.) Last year's conference was a particularly dramatic affair. David Einhorn, the founder of Greenlight Capital, used the event as an opportunity to explain why Lehman Brothers was headed off a cliff. Those who heeded Einhorn's advice did well for themselves, of course: The bank went bust just four months later. Einhorn spoke at the annual confab once again today, although it's too soon to know if the poker-loving hedge fund manager took aim at another financial firm this time around. In the meantime, though, Einhorn's lawyers seem to have done just that. They've been busy trying to crush the other Greenlight Capital.

• New jobless claims are down, but a record number of people are collecting unemployment, which won't be good news for the markets today. [BN, WSJ]
• Bank of America is hoping to pay back the $45 billion in bailout money by the end of the year. And it looks like they might actually be able to do it. [DB, WSJ]
• Speaking of taxpayer money, GMAC is getting $7 billion of it. [WSJ]
• Hedge funds are back: They raked in $15.4 billion in April. [BN]
• The Justice Dep't is looking into shady behavior at Lehman circa '07. [WSJ]
• Britain's Serious Fraud Office is building a "warning system to help it spot hedge fund fraud." But only serious hedge fund fraud, obviously. [Reuters]

• Bank of America raised another $13.47 billion last night. [Reuters]
• How are banks making money these days? They're taking out life-insurance policies on their workers, with themselves listed as beneficiaries. [WSJ]
• The Obama administration may strip the SEC of some of its powers. [BN]

• The Carlyle Group will pay $20 million to end an investigation by Andrew Cuomo into its dealings with pensions and placement agents. [NYT, WSJ]
• Two attorneys at the SEC are under investigation for insider trading. [CBS]
• Hedge fund manager Jim Simons is facing tough questions from angry investors who put money into one of Simons' under-performing funds. [WSJ]
• Barclays is in talks to sell its Barclays Global Investors. Blackrock and Bank of New York Mellon are two of the bidders. [BN, Reuters]
• Six major insurance companies are getting a bailout. [BN, NYT]

• AIG's Ed Liddy now says the company will need three to five years to carry out its restructuring plan and repay taxpayer bailout money. [NYT]
• Hedge funds actually saw returns rise more than three percent in April. [DB]
• Walter Noel's Fairfield Greenwich hedge fund is no more. The disgraced firm is handing over its remaining $2.5 billion to Sciens Capital. [NYP]
• The rich get richer: As financial firms raise capital and pay back TARP money, it's Goldman, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan that are profiting. [Fortune]

• The market has been up big the last few weeks. But the ride may be over. "The market has gone too far, too fast," as one fund manager puts it. [BN]
• Following the stress tests last week, a number of banks have been busy de-stressing: Both Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo raised billions late last week to satisfy new capital requirements mandated by the Fed. [NYT]
• Meanwhile, Bank of America, which needs to raise $34 billion (down from the $50 billion it could have been forced to raise) is looking to offload its stake in China Construction Bank, although finding takers isn't easy. [WSJ]
• Warning: Turning around AIG may take a bit longer than expected. [WSJ]

Last week, Phil Falcone, the billionaire hedge fund mogul best known for picking up the Guccione mansion in 2007 for $49 million, was slapped with a lawsuit by a former employee at his firm. Howard Kagan, who joined Falcone's Harbinger Capital Partners in 2003, claims he was stiffed out of $62 million bonus for the work he did in 2008. How, exactly, did Kagan come up with such a huge sum given Falcone's fund lost, like, billions last year, much like every other hedge fund in town? That's unclear, although it's beginning to look like the suit was part of an attempt to force Falcone into coughing up the cash rather than face the prospect of bad press. Sure, that tactic might work with some nerdy hedge fund manager who enjoys spending quiet nights at home with his HP-12C calculator. But you don't pull that kind of stunt on a ballsy guy like Falcone and live to tell. Did we mention that the dude lives in a former orgy palace and keeps a pet pig in one of his 367 spare bedrooms? [Dealbreaker]

• Bank of America chief Ken Lewis won't be in a good mood today, that's for sure. Regulators have informed the bank that it will have to come up with $34 billion in new capital if it expects to weather the downturn. [WSJ, NYT]
• For its part, Citigroup may have to come up with $5-$10 billion. [Reuters]
• Remember all the outrage that followed the disclosure that AIG had paid out more than $100 million in bonuses? It seems the bonus pool was four times larger than previously anticipated. Oh, well. [NYP]
• Companies cut an estimated 491,000 workers in April, which is less than previous months and possibly a sign that the worst is over. [BN]

It's a good thing hedge fund manager Dan Loeb sold off his carriage house a couple of months ago and is now renting out his jet on an hourly basis. Despite some peppiness on his part, these are clearly tough times for the notoriously temperamental hedge funder. According to his most recent letter to investors, Loeb's firm, Third Point, is currently managing just $1.8 billion, down from more than $5 billion a year ago. And he's been forced to cut staff, too, although the people he kicked to the curb were accountants, techies, and admins, so it's not like it's a big deal or anything. Of course, if he gets really desperate, there are other ways to cut the fat. He could vow to never give fameseeker Julia Allison another free trip on his plane, starters. See? Scaling back in a recession isn't that hard, after all. [Zero Hedge]

• The Treasury is expected to announce in the next few days that it will be extending bailout funds to a handful of life insurance companies. [WSJ]
• Brian Moynihan, who took over Merrill Lynch after John Thain was ousted, is emerging as a potential successor to Bank of America chief Ken Lewis. [WSJ]
• Not that Lewis necessarily needs to be replaced, at least according to Meredith Whitney, who (bizarrely) says Lewis has "done a great job." [BN]
• Blackstone, KKR, and Carlyle are in the running to acquire the mobile phone operations that Verizon Wireless is selling now that it's acquired Alltel. [BN]
• Looks like Jim Cramer has a new enemy. Nouriel Roubini is calling the CNBC star "a buffoon," and Cramer has since responded in kind, of course. [NYP]

Well, Barack Obama does. And Tim Geithner. But no one else. Not one other person on god's green earth likes Lawrence H. Summers. Which is why all the Summers income documents were dumped on Friday.

• The unemployment rate jumped to 8.5 percent in March, the highest since 1983, after a total of 663,000 jobs were eliminated. [NYP, BN]
• At the G-20 summit in London. world leaders agreed to pump $1 trillion into the world economy to help bail out developing countries. [NYT]
• Bank of America chief Ken Lewis says it may take a few quarters to pay bank the $45 billion it received in bailout money. Also: He says Countrywide and Merrill "will prove to be two of the best acquisitions we've ever made" [DB]
• Related: Another top Merrill banker is ditching the firm. [WSJ]
• It appears it's the end of the line for Daniel Zwirn's hedge fund. [DB]
• Hedge fund managers are paying more attention to customers after sustaining heavy losses. So they're, like, wearing ties to work and stuff. [BN]
• A Florida accountant became the first U.S citizen to be arrested as part of the investigation into Americans who hid assets with help from UBS. [AP]
• This can't bode well: American Airlines is in talks to raise cash from its credit card partner, Citigroup, by selling frequent flyer miles. [Reuters]
• It's not as fun being on top these days: The median salaries and bonuses for the CEOs of 200 big companies fell 8.5% to $2.24 million in '08. [WSJ]

• Details on what's been discussed—and what's on the agenda—as President Obama meets other world leaders at the G-20 in London. [BN, NYT, WSJ]
• The House has approved yet another bill to restrict bonuses and compensation at financial firms that have received bailout money. [NYT]
• Former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg will give testimony in front of a congressional panel in Washington today. [WSJ, CNN]
• The number of U.S. workers filing new claims for jobless benefits surged to a nearly 26-year high last week. [Reuters]
• The Justice Department has opened about 100 criminal investigations into wealthy Americans who skirted tax laws as clients of UBS. [Dealbook]
• Real estate prices in NYC have taken a big hit thanks to Wall Street. [Reuters]
• Good news: hedge funds are back in the game, it seems. After a lousy 2008, investors are "tentatively returning to the sector," report some. [FT]

• President Obama will meet with 15 big banking CEOs in Washington today, including Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. Obama plans to "quiz" them "about developments in the economy and their businesses." Sounds like fun. [CNN]
• Hedge fund managers can expect a lot more oversight in the future, which isn't something they're too excited about, not surprisingly. [Reuters, NYP]
• Andrew Cuomo says he now plans to widen his investigation of AIG. [DB]
• Many of the AIG execs charged with preventing the insurance giant from taking on too much risk still have jobs at the company for some reason. [WSJ]
• The exodus of Merrill bankers from Bank of America continues. [DJ, DB]
• Swiss private banks are banning top execs from traveling abroad for fear they will be detained as part of a crackdown on bank secrecy. [Reuters]
• Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing says it's time to start buying stocks and real estate again. Make of that what you will. [NYT]

You heard about the 25 men—and they are always men—who were ranked the top-earning hedge fund managers of the year, walking away with a collective $11.6 billion during 2008. What about the biggest losers? Alpha magazine will publish that list tomorrow, but Dealbreaker has the deets on the top three people on the list: In first place is Ken Griffin, who watched $2 billion vanish, while Eddie Lampert came in second, having witnessed $1 billion evaporate into thin air. Right behind him is Steve Cohen, who was mercifully spared a 10-digit loss but still ended up down $750 million on the year. That doesn't account for the unrealized losses related to Cohen's massive art collection, naturally, but you can't really expect Alpha to tackle that. We're counting on you, Artforum! [Dealbreaker]

Institutional Investor's Alpha magazine released its ranking of the top 25 hedge fund managers today. You'll be happy to hear that even though most people ended 2008 on a gloomy note, a handful of men who were already worth billions made billions more last year thanks to their canny trading strategies or the fact they predicted (correctly!) that a major shakeout was headed our way. In first place was Jim Simons, the former math professor who started the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies and who earned $2.5 billion on the basis of his complex computer-driven approach to the market. In second place: John Paulson, who totally saw the housing market was going to hell in a handbasket, bet big as a result, and has $2 billion to show for his efforts.

• Congress's efforts to recoup bonuses at AIG appear to have cooled over the past few days. And President Obama will make an effort to repair relations with Wall Street when he sits down with a dozen bank CEOs on Friday. [WSJ]
• More on Tim Geithner's proposal yesterday that the government be given the authority to take control of troubled financial institutions. [NYT]
• HSBC is planning to lay off 1,200 people in the UK. [DB]
• Hedge funders may see pay drop by as much as 25 percent this year. [BN]
• A Steve Rattner-less Quadrangle Group has decided to temporarily suspend efforts to raise a third private equity fund. [peHUB]
• More big names have decided to leave Merrill Lynch. [FT, WSJ]
• AIG says it sold two of its jets and has cancelled delivery of two more. [ABC]
• An employee with AIG shares his resignation letter: He says he's been "betrayed by AIG" and "unfairly persecuted by elected officials." [NYT]

• Andrew Cuomo has won the battle to force Bank of America to turn over the names of the 200 Merrill employees who earned the largest bonuses right before the firm was acquired. He says he'll release the info today. [CNN, NYT]
• As you can probably imagine, it's been "the worst week in a string of bad weeks" for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. [NYT]
• Of course, it's also been a pretty lousy few days for AIG chief Ed Liddy, who walked into this big mess when he took the top job last September. [NYT]
• A record number of hedge funds were forced to close up shop last year: About 1,471 hedge funds were liquidated in 2008. [NYP, DB]
• The Fed plans to buy $300 billion of long-term Treasuries and hundreds of billions of dollars more in mortgage-backed securities. [BN, WSJ]
• JPMorgan reports the bank's CEO, Jamie Dimon, earned about $19.7 million in total compensation for 2008. And how did you do last year? [Reuters]
• Citigroup has canceled its order to buy three new jets. [Dealbreaker]

• Following yesterday's stock market surge, some analysts see a comeback in the making. Believe it when you see it. [CNN]
• Investors pulled $11 billion out of hedge funds in February. [BN]
• Related: hedge funds may slash 20,000 jobs around the world this year. [DB]
• Even the junky little banks that should have never been given a piece of the bailout in the first place now want to give the money back. [NYT]
• Some 45% of the world's wealth has been destroyed over the past year, says Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman. [Reuters]
• Tim Geithner appeared on Charlie Rose's show yesterday. [BN]
• Quadrangle Group, the firm formerly headed up by Steve Rattner, has hired three new execs to help manage Michael Bloomberg's money. [DB]
• Good work if you can get it: Hedge find titan John Paulson has made about half a billion bucks since the fall shorting a couple of British banks. [BN]