When the whole Wall Street meltdown thing was first breaking last month, some ad execs waved the whole thing off, saying the market might be a bit "soft" momentarily but that it would surely spring right back into shape. So, how's it looking a month later? Well it's all good, except for how nobody can sell TV ads and ad agencies are laying off hundreds of employees and media sellers are trying to figure out how they can politely start asking for all payments up front. Let's take a brief look at the sunny indicators, shall we?:

Asian and European stock markets are posting gains of 4 to 10 percent this morning thanks to a coordinated effort among several governments to recapitalize banks and insure interbank loans. The futures market is predicting a similar rise for U.S. stocks. For a few precious hours, at least, you'll be able to imagine that the worst of the crash is behind you. But heed the all-knowing Web photo editors, who time and again this morning have selected only slightly less terrified stockbrokers to illustrate their market recovery stories (see left). Maybe their enthusiasm is tempered by that story in the Wall Street Journal this weekend in which 18 economists said we've been doing the bailout all wrong:

"American economist Paul Krugman won the 2008 Nobel prize for economics for bringing together analysis of trade patterns and where economic activity takes place, the prize committee said on Monday." [Reuters via Fishbowl]

The Great Depression wasn't all bad! There was jazz, big band, cabaret, Irving Berlin and tops and tails! Art deco and modernism! So as we slide toward economic catastrophe, let's all nostalgically embrace the elegance of the era so we can stay in denial about the hobos, soup kitchens and fascist and communist rebellions that will soon be upon us. We've already suggested staging rent parties and carrying flasks, plus some songs about hard times and various relevant movies. But nothing quite says "Great Depression fun" like Weimar-era cabaret, which is probably why Max Raabe and a Berlin orchestra are again traveling around America and calming the former middle class with pop songs remade to sound at home in 1930s Berlin. Raabe's Depression-ey cover of Spears' "Oops, I Did It Again" is just the thing to put on your "turntable" when friends gather for some moonshine in your Victory Garden. It's like Wall Street is serenading you! Sample the song after the jump.

Like the drug trade, booze, and motion pictures, prostitution can muster through any economy. Although New York City's ladies of the evening say that the $1000-an-hour sex workers that Eliot Spitzer favors are having a hard time of it, for the middle-range pros business is pretty much as good as ever. "The market is down, business is down, but we feel it less," said Dylan, 24, a promotional model-turned-Manhattan prostitute. "We're still busy. If men are horny, they're going to come in here." Dylan works for a madam who runs a pair of brothels just north of Wall Street, where the going rate is $260 an hour, $160 for half. The madam says that that's all the market will bear right now: "The $1,000-an-hour girls are just not making it." While the woman say their clients are still showing up, they're spending less time and money. "He used to spend at least an hour or two," Sienna says of a banker who's a regular. "Lately he's down to a half-hour, and he's no longer a big tipper." Just when the story couldn't get any drearier, two of the madam's newest recruits turned to selling sex after the shit economy drove them out of more mainstream work. "Shana, 42, lost her $45,000-a-year job as a secretary last year. Sienna [who's working on her graduate degree in English Lit] was laid off in July from her job as an executive assistant with a travel agency. Shana, who worked briefly as a waitress before hooking up with her current gig, is putting her son through college. 'He's trying to get an engineering degree,' she explained. 'With the economy the way it is, how is my son going to get a loan? And he's going to finish college.'" [NYDN]

Click to viewTrading in bank shares could be suspended across the G7 nations tomorrow as the British government carries out plans to take a majority stake in the Royal Bank of Scotland and major holdings in another three of the country's largest banks.

Looks like old Viacom chief Sumner Redstone is the first media mogul to take a significant hit from the present awful economic climate for media companies (Pictured: Viacom's stock chart for the last year). And by "significant hit," we mean "being forced to sell $400 million worth of stock."

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]

Fox Business Network is so happy for this whole Wall Street meltdown thing. Why just recently they finally got an audience that's actually big enough to measure! But even if you agree with many economic experts that Fox Business Network is the financial news equivalent of The Learning Annex, you have to admire their plucky use of ads to snipe at CNBC. They have a new one about how wrong Jim Cramer has been about everything involving money! Which is factually true. Here it is:

Who's to blame for this mess? That's what the American people want to know, right? Nobody wants to hear about intricate economic factors that combined in unforeseen ways to predicate an economic collapse. We want scapegoats! The media, politicians, and plain old dumb people on the street who don't know what the hell they're talking about have all picked out their favorite villains in this national crisis. We take a look at the top ten, after the jump:

Even before the recent collapse of Wall Street, the media was changing. Newspapers dying! Blogs exploding! But back then, in the halcyon days of a couple months ago, the difference was that there were winners and losers amongst the various media sectors. Now, there are only losers. And a few who will hold the line and claim success, because, hey, flat is the new up. After the jump, a brief guide to the important parts of the media, and how they're getting screwed by financial reality: Overarching point: 39 of the 50 members in the Admarket 50—the most important companies to the advertising industry—saw their stocks open at 52-week lows this morning. Ok!

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 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:

Last Friday a rumor went up on CNN's "Citizen journalism" site saying that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had had a heart attack. Apple stock plunged momentarily, but the posting was debunked within the hour. The suspicion now is that the rumor was planted by a short seller looking to capitalize on the skittish reaction of the market. So that means don't trust crazy internet rumors because the internet is lies! Right? No: The incident caused an uproar, but look at what it really was: one guy with a fake post on an unmediated citizen journalism site. Making any stock selling decisions based on that is approximately as risky as making the same decision based on a Craigslist post. It's an inherent gamble. Jeff Jarvis is sanguine:

Whoa, Jim Cramer has fully turned around as much as a man can possibly turn around! The shouty CNBC (poor) stock picker—who as recently as last November was trumpeting "10 Reasons to Be Bullish" ("1. The stock market is cheap")—went on the Today show this morning to virtually beg Americans to pull all the money they might need in the next five years out of the stock market, no matter what the cost. He looks like he's about to cry. This will be one of the defining moments in the media narrative of our nation's impending financial doom. Click to watch an emotional money man embrace his inner Bear.

Ha, everybody watches Mad Men and assumes that advertising must be some kind of glamorous industry. Forget it! The best thing agency big shots can hope for these days: "Create affordable meals and boost the cheese-single business" for Kraft. Wow, that's a "panty-dropper" account for sure! Seriously, most ad people are now stuck touting things like money-saving strategies at JCPenney. Try impressing girls with that. The last available prestige account in these trying times: sucking the blood of the poor more effectively with jingles for the state lottery! Facebook pages. Scratch-and-sniff lottery tickets. Gas discounts. Partnering with Indiana Jones and Deal or No Deal. Lotteries are doing all these things (and more!) to attract the dwindling dollars of desperate Americans into their swollen coffers.

It's like the story of rise and fall of American hubris itself: once upon a time, in the heady days of 2005, Procter & Gamble decided that consumers would not be satisfied with a mere four-blade razor. So they launched Fusion, which boasted five blades and an embedded mini-vibrator, so that American men could enjoy the closest shave in the free world and then pleasure their wives, secure in the knowledge that Osama bin Laden is a hairy bastard shivering in a cave with no sex toys or women, so there. But our shaving pride came before the fall! Now that the US economy has collapsed, all these terribly expensive five-bladed razors are, like Hummers and Steve Schwarzman's birthday party, sad symbols of a nation gone astray. But they still need to sell all these god damn $25 packs of Fusion razors! [WSJ]

Sure, the S&P 500 fell 9 percent last week as financial problems spread further beyond Wall Street. But now one troubled bank. Wachovia, is in such high demand that the federal government had to step in to mediate a dispute between two bitterly competing suitors, Citigroup and Wells Fargo. This must be great news for the economy, because Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit has lost the scowl added to his Wall Street Journal woodcut in the early days of the financial crisis. See his portrait, left, taken from WSJ.com this weekend. He's even forgotten how embarrassing it was when Wells stole the Wachovia deal out from under him! This must mean the panic is over forever, right??

Say what you will about Sarah Palin-that she's a dingbat, an ideologue, and a bit of a creep-but she's not dumb enough to pay her taxes. The McCain campaign released the last two years of her tax returns yesterday in an old school Friday news dump-and she totally cheats! "Palin, it appears, did not pay taxes on the more than $60,000 of travel reimbursements that she and her family members reportedly billed the state during her 18 months as governor." McCain's goons will surely argue that there's nothing wrong with that. Because they are liars. "There is a fairly wonky debate over whether she should have been charged for these trips or whether it was accounted for in her salary. John Bogdanski, a tax professor at the Lewis and Clark Law School, told the Huffington Post's Seth Colter Walls that they did qualify as taxable income." And $60 grand isn't a big deal if you're a total millionaire like John McCain and own eight houses, but Palin is merely wealthy. So she rips off the Treasury Joe Six-Pack style. "According to an accompanying 2007 personal financial disclosure report, Palin's 'income' as governor of Alaska was $196,531.50, well above the $107,987.00 that was noted on her W2 form from that same year." [HuffPo]

Fox Business Network ran ads in the Times and Wall Street Journal this week mocking rival CNBC for showing informercials during a heated weekend in the middle of the Wall Street meltdown. Fox concluded: "We own this story." Not quite. Financial panic did grow the year-old cable network's tiny audience to the point where it could be rated by Nielsen for the first time. But the results won't add any swagger to the step of Fox News chief Roger Ailes: Fox Business peaked at about 81,000 average viewers. During the same period, when Congress voted on the banking bailout Monday, CNBC averaged nearly 900,000 viewers, the Times reported this morning. It appears Fox will need to sweat it through many more weekend shifts to catch up — and pray for a bit more panic, for good measure.