After the young, bald, intense Neel Kashkari was named last week as the unfortunate bastard who will lead the government bailout of Wall Street, all the media was scrambling to find out anything about his background. Besides the fact that he's a Republican ski bum, they haven't really turned up a single iota of dirt on Neel. But we have, possibly! Fellow Americans: Was our new Head Of Money a Ferrari-posing, flag-waving, "egocentric jerk" in high school? A tipster writes:

♦ Morgan Stanley closed its deal with Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. The $9 billion investment on the part of MUFJ gives it a 21 percent stake in the beleaguered bank. [WSJ, DB]
♦ U.S. stock futures rallied on Monday morning as government efforts to beef up the banking system reassured panicky investors. [WSJ]
♦ Treasury official Neel Kashkari outlined the government's efforts to bail out the financial system and resuscitate the economy this morning, although details were few and far between. [CNNMoney]
♦ New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman won the Nobel economics prize this morning. He'll collect a $1.4 million check for the honor. [Economix]

Either our nation's elite reporters are all snoozing, or our nation's young new bailout chief Neel Kashkari is a pretty boring guy (likely). But the WSJ today, after an exhaustive investigation, did manage to dig up this nugget: "'Everyone at Goldman has a full head of hair and went to prep school and Dartmouth and played lacrosse. That’s not Neel,' said an investment banker who knew him." Hey, remember Kevin Pollak in The Usual Suspects? "Did you put that together yourself, Einstein? Whattaya, got a team of monkeys working around on the clock on this?" [WSJ]

Unpatriotic dissenters are expressing doubts about Neel Kashkari, America's new young bullet-headed money whiz who's been tapped to lead this great nation out of the pit of financial despair. How dare they! It was almost humorous how little anyone knew about the 35-year-old AC/DC fan when the Treasury Dept. assigned him to lead the massive bailout earlier this week. But now we know more about: his family! His politics! His hobbies! And his wall art:

♦ The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that it would provide up to $37.8 billion to AIG. That's on top of the $85 billion lifetime the insurance giant got a few weeks ago. [NYT]
♦ Hank Paulson suggested yesterday the government may invest in banks as part of the next step in trying to resolve the credit crisis. [Bloomberg, NYT]
♦ Talks continue between Wells Fargo and Citigroup, who are both vying for control of Wachovia, although they appear close to a settlement. [WSJ, DB]

Every coder in the Valley was thinking that somewhere, somehow, we'd get called upon to fix the market meltdown. And sure enough, one of our own has been called to the job: Neel Kashkari, a 35-year-old finance whiz kid, has been tapped to spend the Treasury's $700 billion splurge on busted debt derivatives. Who is this guy?He worked at Goldman Sachs, in San Francisco, before joining the government, advising security-software companies on mergers and acquisitions — and he still has a house here. Prior to getting his MBA — Wharton, not Stanford, alas — he worked as an aerospace engineer at TRW on Nasa missions, and got a bachelor's and master's at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — Netscape founder Marc Andreessen's alma mater.

The United States Treasury has selected the man whose job is to save our nation's finances by leading the government bailout of Wall Street: a 35-year-old AC/DC lover. Oh that's just great US government, just great. The whole entire media is scrambling to come up with enough background on the guy to fill up a feature story, and it's rough going. We've condensed every salient interesting fact about Neel Kashkari, the unblinking anointed guardian of your money, in a handy guide, after the jump: