• Have you heard? Our banks are insolvent. Happy Friday to you, too. [NYT]
• The markets are down this morning as the House and Senate prepare to vote on the $789 billion economic stimulus package. [CNN]
• It's still unclear whether Wall Street got the message that "that high living on the corporate tab is now unacceptable." That's comforting to hear. [Reuters]
• Leon Black's Apollo has tapped Henry Silverman as COO. [WSJ]
• AIG's financial products unit is now under investigation in Britain. [DB]
• Morgan Stanley has suspended its global head of real estate investing. [FT]
• Prosecutors have started interviewing employees of Bernie Madoff. [WSJ]
• Tim Geithner and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke are in Rome today and tomorrow to meet their G-7 counterparts to discuss the stimulus plan. [WSJ]
• Time's list of 25 people to blame for the economic crisis. [Time]

"This is a package that is responsive to this massive gap." That's not a line from an upcoming bailout porno. That's how Peter Orszag, Obama's budget director, really talks! And he's not the only one.

• Citigroup and Morgan Stanley may announce a joint venture combining their brokerage divisions as early as today or tomorrow. The firms have already agreed to set aside $2 billion and $3 billion to retain top brokers. [WSJ, NYP]
• The joint venture isn't giving Citigroup or its CEO, Vikram Pandit, much of a boost. Shares dropped 17 percent yesterday as investors grew concerned the deal was prompted by Citi's desperation more than anything else. [NYT]
• Close to 2,000 former Merrill Lynch employees in London have been laid off by new parent Bank of America. [Times UK]
• AIG is expected to sell its Canadian life insurance operations to Bank of Montreal to repay government loans. [BN]
• Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke says a fiscal stimulus won't be enough to spur an economic recovery. [BN]

Wall Street won't have much to celebrate this holiday season. Most firms have announced record losses in recent weeks, thousands of employees have been let go, and even that banking birthright, the annual bonus, appears to be in jeopardy this year. Goldman Sachs announced yesterday that its top seven execs would forgo multi-million bonus checks. UBS followed suit hours later, and there's word that other banks will make similar moves in the coming days. Of course, the impact of the downturn isn't just felt by the bankers themselves. Some unlucky wives, for example, are just finding out that they're going to spend Christmas at the Four Seasons in Maui, instead of the Altamer in St. Barths, since someone decided that $10,000 for a beachfront suite was a little too much money to spend on a vacation right now. Fortunately, we're here to help. Friends, Wall Street cannot lift itself out of this mess alone, even if they happen to have tens of billions of taypayer dollars. If they're going to pull themselves up, we're all going to need to chip in, and then we'll all be rewarded when these financial titans return to their frivolous lives and start spending ridiculous amounts of money on real estate, clothes, and dinners once again. We may not be able to send them big bundles of cash (they've got the Treasury Department for that anyway), but there are countless other ways to help, little gestures that can make life easier for men who could use a little comfort as they experience sudden lifestyle changes, like having to fly commercial for the first time in years. Below: How we're going to lend some assistance to Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs.