You might think that American Apparel would thrive in the recession, with their affordable clothes and dirtbag-embracing ads. But you'd be wrong, since an investor just rescued them from defaulting on a loan.

• Investors are finding "wisps of hope" in the current not-so-bad economic news, so the three-day winning streak on Wall Street may continue today. [DB]
• AIG reached out to Warren Buffett twice before ultimately collapsing. [BN]
• Citigroup is looking at adding four new people to the company's board. [WSJ]
• Ken Lewis seems to be sending signals he wants out of BofA. [Dealbreaker]
• H. Rodgin Cohen is out of the running to be deputy Treasury secretary. [DB]
• There's already chatter that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner may get pushed aside in favor of—yes, you guessed it—Steve Rattner. [BI]
• How bad is it for hedge funds? John Paulson was up 38 percent last year and he still lost 16 percent of his assets during the last half of 2008. [Portfolio]
• Two things you never expected to see: A meek, frightened Jim Cramer on national television. And a comedian talking about CDOs. [The Daily Show]

"Banks That Spent the Most on TV Ads Performed the Best." Crisis: Solved.

It sure is nice to see positive news for a change! Stocks advanced for a third straight day with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing up 239 points. One reason for the boost: People are shopping again! Actually, they're not really shopping; they're just cutting back a little bit less than they did before. Retail sales "only" dropped 0.1% in February, according to the Commerce Department, compared to a 1.8% drop in January. Keep it up, people! You'll put a smile on a sales associate's face and you'll be rescuing the country. Oh, and you'll be taking home a new suit or pair of shoes, too, which is always nice. [CNN Money]

• Bernie Madoff will appear in court this morning to plead guilty to 11 counts. Then it wil be up to the judge to decide if he gets locked up immediately or is allowed him to remain free on bail pending sentencing. [DB]
• Meanwhile, the investigation into Madoff's Ponzi scheme is now focusing on the accounting firms that may have helped him carry out the scheme. [NYT]
• Base salaries on Wall Street may double as bonuses drop. [BN]
• Andrew Cuomo says Merrill Lynch misled Congress over the timing of its plans to award billions of dollars in bonuses last December. [NYT, WSJ]
• BofA is putting a private bank it inherited from Merrill up for sale. [Reuters]
• Texas billionaire Allen Stanford took the Fifth yesterday. [AP]
• Carl Icahn has abandoned his bid to take over Lionsgate. [BN]
• GE has lost its triple-A credit rating from Standard and Poor's. [DB]
• Foreclosure filings in the U.S. jumped 30% in February. [BN]

The problem with the economy isn't that financial institutions took obscene risks over the past few years in search of extraordinary returns. Or that tone-deaf banking CEOs have been undermining the system (and the terms of the bailout) by handing out bonuses and sending execs on lavish trips. The problem is that too many people are making fun of bankers! At least that's what JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon says: "When I hear the constant vilification of corporate America, I personally don't understand it... I would ask a lot of our folks in government to stop doing it because I think it's hurting our country." Are you listening, Washington? If this sort of stuff continues, Dimon might be forced to resort to The Claw! [BN via NYM]

• 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]

Remember those Merrill Lynch junkets to the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, which the Orlando-Sentinel first revealed last month and which we reported on again last week? Yea, well, it looks like Merrill is now in a bit of trouble. The Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program has confirmed that it is now looking into whether or the trips violated the law. [Orlando-Sentinel via BI]

The stock market was up big today! Hard to imagine, huh? The Dow closed up more than 375 points, its biggest gain since November, following encouraging comments by Fed chair Ben Bernanke, news that Citigroup had turned a profit during the first two months of '09, and hints that the government planned to reinstate rules governing short sales of stocks. Don't get too excited just yet: "Similar sharp rallies in September, October and November turned out to be fleeting, and the market has still not had two gaining sessions since Feb. 5 and Feb. 6." [Marketwatch, NYT]

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is enduring the most challenging stretch of his career for many reasons: His credibility took a hit before he even took the job thanks to his little tax issue, he's managing the nation's finances during quite possibly the bleakest moment in American economic history, and in recent weeks he's been isolated in a sad, lonely office where he's had to make do with a skeletal staff. One more reason why Geithner may have the worst job in the world (with the possible exception of Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit): When a disgruntled former employee of the IRS decides to sue the agency because it didn't give him a "riser for his computer monitor" or the larger cubicle he requested, and he suffers severe neck and back pain and emotional distress as a result, it's Geithner's name that appears all over the lawsuit. Poor Timmy. The full suit is below.

• Citigroup chief Vikram Pandit says the bank is "having the best quarter since 2007." Good news. Don't pay any attention to the fact regulators are making "contingency plans" in case Citi "takes a sudden turn for the worse." [BN, WSJ]
• Yet another Citi misstep: In addition to $3.5 million in gift cards, the bank gave out $13 million to employees whose vacations were canceled. [BN]
• Andrew Cuomo's assault on Bank of America continues: He's sent a new letter to BofA chief Ken Lewis demanding information on bonus payments—and he even had Barney Frank co-sign it. That will definitely do the trick. [NYP]
• Lehman's buyout division is back in business under new ownership. [FT]
• Boutique investment banking is back, in case you didn't hear. [DB]
• A firm that JP Morgan inherited when it took over Bear Stearns was sold to Barclays for $30 million. Bear paid $625 million for it in 2001. [WSJ]
• The jobless rate may reach 9.4% this year, a new survey suggests. [BN]

J. Ezra Merkin, the disgraced money manager who steered more than $2 billion to Bernie Madoff, has a new lawsuit to contend with. NYU filed suit against Merkin last month, accusing him of losing $24 million of the unversity's endowment due to his "deliberate ignorance." Now a pension plan, which says it lost $4 million investing in Merkin's various funds, is taking action, too. The full complaint appears below.

• It's expected to be a rough week ahead for financial markets. [Reuters, WSJ]
• The world economy is on track to post its worst performance since the Great Depression, according to a report by the World Bank. [CNN]
• The financial crisis seems to be "getting ahead" of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, as if you weren't aware of that already. [NYT]
• The big beneficiaries of the AIG bailout: Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, and a handful of other banks both foreign and domestic. [WSJ]
• After canceling a trip to reward its top brokers, Citigroup gave out $3.5 million worth of gift cards to 2,000 people as a consolation prize. [NYP]
• Credit markets appear to be tightening up once again. [WSJ]
• JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs advised on Merck's $41 billion acquisition of Schering-Plough, which was announced this morning. [DB]
• Expect to see fewer foreign bankers living it up in NYC beginning this summer: Bank of America is withdrawing job offers made to foreign MBA students. [FT]

Here's something funny/depressing to keep in mind: If you don't have an account at Citibank but you end up using a Citi ATM machine and you cough up the fee, you'll be paying for the equivalent of three shares of Citigroup. "To put it differently, Citi gets a capital injection from each ATM transaction that is three times as valuable as issuing new shares." [Business Insider]

• The unemployment rate jumped to 8.1% last month, the highest it's been since December 1983 and above expectations for an 8% rate. [WSJ, NYT, BN]
• A "trading irregularity" at Merrill may have cost the firm hundreds of millions of dollars. Naturally, no one seemed to notice any of this until after the bank was acquired by BofA and Merrill handed out record bonuses. [BN, DB]
• Wells Fargo has slashed its quarterly dividend to a nickel a share. [WSJ]
• Citigroup may sell its stake in Japan's second-largest online broker. [DB]
• Would you like to invest in the bailout? You may get your chance. [WaPo]
• Did you lose your finance job? How about a job at Cantor Fitzgerald? [DB]

It was another crappy day on Wall Street. The Dow fell 281 points, or 4.1 percent, and shares of Citigroup dropped below a dollar this morning before closing out the session at $1.02. You won't find much good news on the job front: A new report indicates the city has seen a whopping 85,400 jobs vanish since August. So is there any good news to report? Michael Jackson made a rare public appearance today to confirm he's staging a comeback tour, so if that serves as any consolation, well, we're glad to hear it. [CNN, NYT]

Hope you didn't make the big mistake of taking Michael Bloomberg's investment advice yesterday! The mayor singled out three companies, telling reporters that General Electric, Macy's and Saks were all "irreplaceable brands" and were undervalued in the current market. But with the exception of GE, which is about where it started, both Macy's and Saks are down big today. Guess a career as an investment advisor probably isn't in the cards if his re-election campaign doesn't pan out this November.

• Andrew Cuomo has issued subpoenas to several of the Merrill Lynch employees who made it on to the highest-paid list for 2008. [WSJ, DB]
• Merrill is now suing Deutsche Bank for "raiding" several top bankers. [BN]
• More Merrill news: Two ex-CEOs say they were victims of Madoff. [Reuters]
• GE seems to be in some serious trouble thanks to losses at GE Capital; shares of the company are at their lowest point since '91. [WSJ, BN, DB]
• UBS execs on Capitol Hill said the bank has no plans to give up the names of clients behind the 52,000 accounts connected to illegal tax shelters. [NYT]
• The good news: The number of new jobless claims dropped last week. The not-so-good news: Worker productivity is down. [NYT, BN]

A bit of good news, at last. The markets snapped a five-day losing streak today with the Dow jumping 150 points, or 2.2 percent, and the S&P 500 gaining 2.4 percent. Don't get too excited, though. Investors are already bracing for the monthly employment report, which the Department of Labor will release on Friday and should be predictably gruesome. But in the meantime, enjoy! [NYT, CNN]

You'd think Merrill Lynch executives would have learned their lesson by now. Just two weeks after getting chastised in the press for sending employees down to the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando for a "training event"—and despite all the negative PR the firm has sustained in recent weeks, including revelations about corporate pay just today—a big group of Merrill employees are now resting comfortably by the pool. Again. A tipster informed us that Merrill was conducting yet another warm-weather event at the fancy Orlando hotel today. We called the hotel, asked for the front desk, and then requested to be connected to the conference room where the Merrill Lynch conference was taking place. "Global Wealth Management," said the kindly woman who answered the phone before confirming to us that a Merrill event was, in fact, taking place at the hotel. (Alas, she wouldn't say how many Merrill employees were on hand for the conference, or if any taxpayer-funded golf events were on the agenda today.) But we're guessing Andrew Cuomo will be terribly disappointed to hear he wasn't invited.