This is reportedly the (real) first post-collapse ad from failed bank WaMu, and it's very... direct? "WaMu has a bright new future, thanks to the stability of JPMorgan Chase (and their nearly trillion dollars in customer deposits). [ETC.]" says the fine print. The failed institution deserves credit for confronting its massive failure. Although the ad would have been more appropriate in grey. Do not fail to click to enlarge. [Change Order via AgencySpy]

Oh good, more attack ads! Not in politics—in the cutthroat world of soup. As we newly poor Americans gather our last remaining pennies from our decimated retirement accounts, hitchhike to the grocery store, and head for the soup aisle to ponder what watery concoction can best momentarily quiet our growling bellies, marketers are more determined than ever to ensure you pick their cheap concoction above their competitors'. So they're running ads savaging rivals like Progresso and McDonald's who are just wrong for America:

The monster $700 billion plan to fix America's broken credit markets passed the senate by a wide 74-25 margin and is set for a House vote by the end of the week. How was the reviled, once-vanquished bailout resurrected? By becoming more bailout-ey! The federal government will still spend most of the money taking distressed mortgages off the books of poor, sad Wall Street firms like Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup. But also, as we mentioned before the vote, everyone with insurance now gets therapy and meds! The upper middle class gets an adjustment to the Alternative Minimum Tax. Corporations get a tax break for "research." Oh, and also, no big deal but probably companies don't have to play by basic accounting rules anymore (search for "mark to market" here). But the bailout became less bailout-ey in one regard: In the lead of the Wall Street Journal story (bottom example above), it's called a "rescue," the nomenclature preferred by the Bush administration. In the Times it's still a bailout. And what do you know, the papers have sharply diverging editorials (the Journal quotes Alexander Hamilton!) to go along with their positions.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune is in severe financial distress, of course, because it is a newspaper. It was sold (at a loss) by McClatchy in 2006 to a private equity firm, and has reliably lost value ever since. Though it still "makes money" in the strictest sense of the term! The paper has already laid off 100 newsroom people and put its headquarters up for sale, but now the company has hit on a new strategy for saving money: not paying the bills! The paper announced that it won't be paying creditors this quarter.

That was fast. Four of the business writers said last week to be hunting for Wall Street crisis book deals have found publishers — the same publisher. Penguin Group swears it wasn't bumbling when it hired the authors in rapid succession, at a cost of more than $2 million, to basically compete with one other. What does Penguin look like, some kind of investment bank? "I would rather be publishing all three of the best books on the economic crisis than to be competing against any one of them," Penguin's president told the Observer. OK, but who's going to buy these tomes?

So it turns out that the same night James Cramer was bragging about foretelling the Wall Street meltdown he was in the midst of a colossal fuckup. The CNBC host on September 15 recommended shares of Wachovia as a safe haven from the financial panic. Cramer took comfort in the words his former Goldman Sachs boss Robert Steel, who earlier in the show said his company Wachovia had "a great future." "You're a reassuring face," Cramer told him. In between, a CNBC promo promised "Fast, accurate, actionable, unbiased" advice. Wachovia of course went to liquidate at $1 per share Monday, less than a tenth of its value when Cramer recommended the stock. Cramer quickly apologized Monday night. "I wasn't skeptical enough," he said. It's all in the video after the jump.

FriendFeed is the best Scoble-tracking technology ever. Without it, I'd never have caught his blurt-out reply to PopTech conference cofounder Anthony Citrano: "Breadlines are coming and I'll personally blame people like you ... celebrating on the backs of the working suckers who will now get laid off." Hey, I'm one of those working suckers. Writers don't get laid off — we get unpublished in advance.

Just last week, Wachovia awarded its $100 million-plus advertising account to WPP. Then yesterday Wachovia was bought by Citigroup, and they were like, Hey, whoa, no ad deal after all! That really sucks the big one, in ad industry parlance. Too bad for Wachovia, too; perhaps a better ad agency could have ensured that the bank didn't end up with horrific ad placement like this, in today's Wall Street Journal:

Yesterday we learned that our national diet is shifting towards cheap, simple meals like tomato soup and Kool-Aid because of the national economic meltdown. But that doesn't mean your tomato-Kool-Aid soup must be boring and plain! Publishers are flooding the market with a new crop of food magazines, just in time for our collective shift from a nation of gourmet snobs to a nation of bony, coupon-clipping scavengers. 2008 saw the publication of 336 food magazines, up by a third from only five years ago. That's probably way more than necessary! Bad move? Here's a market summary: Interest is up. News stand sales and web traffic are both up. But! Ad pages are down. Several big food magazines have already seen double-digit drops in ad pages. And outside industries like travel and home furnishings that advertise in some food magazines are also hurting, and buying fewer ads. So what are publishers doing? Tying new magazines to celebrity chefs, or to the Food Network. Paula Deen! Sandra Lee! Rachael Ray! All big successes, or predicted to be! Other, more mundane cooking titles will surely fall by the wayside over the next year. The future of American food publishing: "Rachael Ray Tells You How To Use Lard To Re-Fry Your McDonalds Burgers To Raise Your Family's Caloric Intake Above Minimal Survival Levels." Mmmm! [WSJ]

It's not yet know whether the Washington Mutual on Avenue A in the East Village will be among 540 closed by acquirer JP Morgan Chase. But given that the WaMu's failure was the largest in U.S. history , the branch's signage could hardly have malfunctioned in a more appropriate fashion. (Thanks to the tipster who snapped this image on a BlackBerry and sent it in. We're taking it on faith that this isn't a Photoshop job.)

Now that the wizards of Wall Street have destroyed all hope for your future economic security, it's time to start eating like a pauper! That's the new ad strategy that our nation's largest food companies are pursuing, reasoning that the fancy Pepperidge Farm cookies and "vegetables" are going to be the first thing that shoppers slash from their budgets in these lean times. Why not try some grilled cheese and tomato soup? Shiny apples for a nickel! But this nutritional depression has an upside: Hey, Kool-Aid! Among the products that are getting a new marketing push since the financial apocalypse: Cereal, soup, milk, and "single serve frozen dinners." Don't forget the ramen noodles and berries foraged from the forest! And also:

Last week the Observer, Tom Wolfe said the truly rich would be protected from the Wall Street meltdown because all the smart guys had long since decamped for hedge funds, leaving investment banks staffed by "real second-raters." This weekend in the Times, the author of Bonfire of the Vanities clarified that statement by adding that elite hedge funders may still be ruined, just not until September 30, that is to say tomorrow. In other words, these strapping Masters of the Universe are so ingenious they staved off the sad fate of i-bankers for all of maybe 14 extra days:

Congress has drafted and frozen the consensus agreement reached this morning on the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. The House is set to vote tomorrow. Now would be the time for supporters to at least briefly indulge the naysayers, especially given the weak recent state of opposition politics in this country. Elven Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich has had his brief say on the House floor. And within the media? In 2006 it was a reporter for This American Life playing the contrarian, asking basic questions about then-popular subprime mortgages. "Sometimes, if you want the real answer, you have to ask a dumb question," Times columnist David Carr writes of the reporting in Monday's paper. Today , the person asking the "dumb" question is David Cay Johnston, until recently the Times' aggressive tax reporter. He's wondering whether we're in a crisis at all!

Early this morning, Congressional leaders announced they'd come to a tentative agreement on a $700 billion bailout plan to save America. Yay? Thankfully, a kindly reporter at Reuters has gone ahead and laid out the key points of the plan, which still needs to be ratified by the full House and Senate. See the solution that will totally revolutionize Wall Street and protect us from douchebankers forever and ever after the jump. -The $700 billion in buying power would be doled out by Congress in stages. After the first $250 billion is authorized, the President could request another $100 billion. The final $350 billion could be cleared by a further act of Congress. - Washington will take a stake in companies helped through the program so that taxpayers can share in the profits if those companies get back on their feet. - A new congressional panel would have oversight power and the Treasury secretary would report regularly to lawmakers in two elements of a multi-level oversight apparatus. - Compensation limits would be set for the chiefs of participating firms to prevent excessive pay and "golden parachutes" for those who might tap government aid and then quit. - The federal government may stall foreclosure proceedings on home loans purchased under the plan. - Alongside the plan to buy securities outright, the Treasury Department will conceive an alternative insurance program that would underwrite troubled loans and would be paid for by participating companies. - If the government has taken losses five years into the program, the Treasury Department will draft a plan to tax the companies that took part to recoup taxpayer losses.

Two weeks ago began a tempestuous weekend that saw Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG begin to collapse as going concerns. It's been a relentless 14 days since. Lehman failed; Merrill sold itself for a song and AIG had to get bailed out by the government. We've seen the last two independent investment banks give up that status so they can accept federal cash; the Treasury Department propose a $700 billion banking bailout and bitterly divide the government; and John McCain controversially suspend his presidential campaign. The morning papers today bring word of the largest bank failure in American history at Washington Mutual, splashed in full panic font across the front of the louder-than-ever Wall Street Journal (pictured). Tonight we'll finally find out if the first presidential debate occurs, and either way it won't be pleasant. Don't let your guard down for the weekend: Those who did so seven days ago missed "the end of Wall Street." (Good luck relaxing.)

As if celebrity babies didn't face enough perils — paparazzi, feuding celebrity parents, ill-advised playdates with Michael Jackson — they now have to keep a weary little eye on the stock market. Because amid Wall Street meltdown and the worst advertising decline in seven years rumors are now swirling that the undisputed highroller in the market for pictures of famous infants, OK! magazine, is cutting off payments for exclusive shots of the little tykes. (Sure, the fees usually went to charity, but you can't put a price tag on adulation.) New general manager Kent Brownridge has allegedly said "no more picture buying, and to keep readers interested we will have to 'get creative,'" a disgruntled staffer told Page Six. Underlings are no doubt praying Brownridge doesn't confirm another rumor and squander the savings hiring boss-from-hell Bonnie Fuller to replace a departing Sarah Ivens. Reports the Post:

The brilliance of Bill O'Reilly, such as it is, is his ability to put an emphatically populist spin on any Republican policy, no matter how plutocrat-friendly, and also to get comically enraged about random external stimuli of every sort. By those standards, the Fox News pundit's radio show tonight was a virtuoso performance. Suddenly, to defend a $700 billion bailout aimed at Wall Street banks but opposed by Congressional conservatives, O'Reilly lashed out at "right-wing liars" and "rich guys" with "big cigars," (Those rich cigar smokers aren't bankers, as you might logically conclude, but elitist right-wing talk show hosts.) Then he promised to severely beat both the House and Senate finance committees, personally, by breaking off their fingers. If only Hank Paulson had thought of that! Click the video icon to listen.

The first half of Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric aired tonight and it's already making the wrong sorts of headlines. This is looking a lot like Palin's train wreck sit-down with ABC News' Charlie Gibson. (Video of the most damaging moments — this time around — after the jump.)

Somehow, YouTube already has a copy of David Letterman tonight lacerating John McCain for skipping the Late Show and suspending his campaign in the midst of the Wall Street meltdown. As reported earlier by Drudge, Letterman became especially upset when he caught the Republican presidential nominee in a live feed from New York being interviewed by his own network's Katie Couric. McCain had personally told Letterman he was canceling because he was headed back to the capital to handle the financial crisis. Whoops.

Halfway through a cranky discussion with the Observer on New York real estate development, Tom Wolfe turned with relish to the topic of the ongoing financial panic. The enthusiasm was understandable from an author who wrote an epic novel, Bonfire Of The Vanities, psychologically centered on Wall Street. First thing to understand, according to Wolfe: Investment banks like Lehman Brothers hire losers, "real second-raters" from "the bottom of the barrel" who couldn't get on at hedge funds. Of course they set your money on fire! Second thing to understand: Even these incompetents might have made do if it weren't for the evils of information technology: