The Wall Street Journal published an excellent piece today on the fall of Lehman Brothers, which is worth a read if you're into that sort of thing, you have access to the Journal site, and you have the patience to digest a 4,800-word article. This afternoon WSJ.com followed up with a few casting suggestions for the movie that will inevitably be made about the biggest bankruptcy in history, and while we can't say we're convinced about George Clooney playing John Thain, Ben Kingsley in the role of Dick Fuld strikes us as an unusual and yet oddly compelling choice. It's certainly better than what the Celebrity Match Up game came up with: The site's facial recognition software picked Andy Garcia as Fuld's ideal stand-in. [WSJ/Deal Journal]

• The number of workers filing new claims for jobless benefits jumped by 30,000 to a 26-year peak last week. [Reuters]
• AmEx and CIT will get $5.72 billion in bailout money. [Reuters]
• Doubts about Bernie Madoff now appear to date back several decades. [WSJ]
• Liliane Bettencourt, the world's wealthiest woman, is believed to have invested in Bernie Madoff via Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, the money manager who committed suicide at his office yesterday. [Bloomberg, NYT]
• Steve Feinberg's Cerberus, which has suffered several losing months, is now limiting investor redemptions. [Bloomberg]
• Execs at Old Lane, the hedge fund operated by Vikram Pandit before it was acquired by Citigroup, may be leaving the bank to start a new company. [WSJ]
• Hedge funder Larry Robbins is cutting compensation and staff. [NYP]

• The U.S. economy slowed sharply in the third quarter, according the new figures released by the Commerce Department this morning. [MW]
• Lehman Brothers has won bankruptcy court approval to sell its investment management assets, including Neuberger Berman. [DB]
• What did banks do with their bailout billions? They're not saying. [AP]
• A record number of M&A deals were cancelled in 2009. [FT]
• Investigators looking into the Madoff mess continue to focus their attention on a key Madoff lieutenant, Frank DiPascali. [WSJ]
• A Madoff investor has filed suit against the SEC, the first attempt by a victim of the scheme to go after regulators. [Reuters]

Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain didn't collect a bonus—his request for $10 million quickly turned into a PR disaster—but the same can't be said for some of the execs Thain recruited to the firm. Peter Kraus, who joined the bank in September, resigned last week after the sale of Merrill to Bank of America triggered a $25 million bonus payout, which the Journal helpfully points out, comes out to 0.1 percent of the total amount ($25 billion) BofA collected from American taxpayers as part of the bailout. An even more mind-numbing calculation: Kraus collected roughly $277,000 for every day he worked at the firm. [WSJ]

• Next in line for a bailout: Step right up, real estate developers! [WSJ]
• Currency traders have been least affected by the gloomy bonus season. [BN]
• JPMorgan is purchasing two business units from UBS. [MW]
• The banks that have received taxpayer bailouts paid their top executives nearly $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses and other benefits in 2007. [DB]
• John Thain's tarnished legacy at Merrill Lynch. [Bloomberg]
• 40 partners have bailed from crumbling law firm Thacher Proffitt. [NYT]
• Tim Geithner's daunting new job: Secretary of Saving the World. [Slate]

The foible-filled comeback of Eliot Spitzer continues! It turns out the luv guv—who does know about Wall Street—lost money to hedge fund scammer Bernie Madoff, like everyone else. And it's Slate's fault!:

• President Bush announced a rescue plan for General Motors and Chrysler that will provide $13.4 billion in federal loans. [CNN]
• Jamie Dimon and Bob Rubin will go bonus-less this year. [Reuters]
• Not surprisingly, Credit Suisse's plan to pay out bonuses with "toxic" securities has "elicited livid reactions from senior bankers." [WSJ]
• A former Lehman employee has been charged with insider trading. [CNN]
• One person who will profit from the Madoff mess: Bruce Wasserstein. Lazard has been appointed to sell the trading operations of Madoff's company. [WSJ]
• There are two—yes, two—books already in the works about Madoff. [TBS]

Today may be Dan Loeb's 47th birthday, but the billionaire hedge fund manager didn't take the day off work to hang out at his mansion in East Hampton or tool around his $45 million apartment at 15 Central Park West. Did he turn up at the office today? Did the Loebs go on vacation? We have no clue, but we're pleased to report that despite the market losses he's sustained recently (and that little issue with his Gulfstream jet), he still has an "estate manager" on the payroll. Comforting news in these troubled times! We would recommend, however, that the Loebs consider upgrading the home answering machine at their Hamptons house. That thing sounds dreadful. [Cityfile voicemails]

• The Journal is reporting that GM and Chrysler have resumed merger talks, although both companies have denied it. Chrysler has, however, said that it plans to shut down production for a month. [WSJ, Bloomberg, DB]
• Morgan Stanley employees will see bonuses drop by half this year. [NYP]
• Partners at Goldman Sachs may see bonuses fall by 80 percent. [FT]
• Mary Schapiro will head up the SEC in the Obama administration. [MW]
• More on the efforts to expose Bernie Madoff many years earlier, concerns that were brought to the SEC and ignored. [WSJ]
• Real estate execs in NYC have been particularly hard hit by Madoff. [NYT]
• What to do if you lost a fortune to Bernie Madoff? Sue someone. [FT, NYP]

While most people on Wall Street are in a state of panic these days, it's worth noting that not everyone is heading into Christmas vacation with their gloomy look on their faces. Financial News has issued its list of the year's biggest winners and losers. The man who earned the No. 1 spot on the "Profit Makers" list? John Paulson, the gloomy-looking hedge fund manager on your left, who not only took home a ridiculous $3.7 billion last year, but is up another 20 percent in 2008. [WSJ]

• The SEC admitted last night that it failed to follow up on repeated warnings over the years to investigate Bernie Madoff's firm and says it plans to conduct an internal investigation; it also is looking into the relationship between Eric Swanson, a former lawyer at the agency, and Shana Madoff, a niece of Bernie, who later got married. [WSJ, NYT, ABC]
• A look at Walter M. Noel, the founder of the Fairfax Greenwich Group and the middle-man who handed over $7.5 billion to Madoff's firm. [NYT]
• More on Bernie's lifestyle, including his fondness for manicures, steak dinners at the Palm, and trips aboard his boat named Bull. [Bloomberg]
• Morgan Stanley reported a fourth quarter loss of $2.29 billion. [WSJ, CNN]
• To cut costs, Citigroup has announced that it plans to combine its corporate and investment banking businesses. [DB, Dealbreaker]

The financial sector is heavily and sufficiently regulated! It's a familiar refrain, but last year it was coming from rich-people-ponzi-scheme operator Bernie Madoff, who added that financial criminals were always caught very quickly.

Everybody knows what Bernie Madoff did—hustle a lot of people out of $50 billion. But nobody's really explained how he did it. Now we're finding out his purported "strategy" was obviously fake.

Consumerist's Biggest Business Debacles [AdAge]

Execs at the National Lampoon are charged with illegally inflating the company's stock price, which leads to a blogger making a predictable joke. Comedy sucks these days. [TheStreet.com]

Steve Feinberg is the elusive founder of Cerberus Capital, the private equity giant that paid $7.4 billion to acquire 80 percent of Chrysler in 2007. For years Feinberg has done his very best to remain in the shadows: Few photos of him have been published—the ones that have typically been outdated or grainy—and he almost never speaks with the press, preferring to leave those duties to the firm's chairman, former Treasury Secretary John Snow. Until now, that is. Feinberg headed to Washington on Friday to participate in negotiations over the auto industry bailout and soon found himself confronted by reporters on the scene. "When other reporters figured out it was Feinberg—who has rarely been photographed in 20 years on Wall Street—photographers and TV crews swarmed him," reports the Detroit News. A photographer for the AP managed to snap a pic of the elusive billionaire (above) before "he and the other Cerberus executives fled to a tiny room in the Capitol basement." Nice to see one of the most powerful men in finance (and one of the country's most prolific Republican fundraisers) come out of the shadows, isn't it? In honor of his outing, we're pleased to share a couple of other photos of the notoriously secretive billionaire. After the jump, photos of Feinberg holding up his prey from a hunting trip last winter.

Bernie Madoff ripped off dozens of wealthy investors, hedge funds, schools, and non-profit institutions over the years (and his elaborate scheme has also helped sap what little confidence remains in the financial markets at large). But there's some positive news for his victims, people like Mets owner Fred Wilpon and real estate tycoon Mort Zuckerman. It turns out that "investment losses that result from theft" are fully tax-deductible, according to experts. [Financial Week]

• The list of companies, charities and individuals who lost massive sums in connection with Bernie Madoff continues to grow: Mort Zuckerman, Elie Wiesel, Sen. Frank Lautenberg and a charity tied to Steven Spielberg are just a few of the latest victims. [WSJ, NYT]
• Many of Madoff's victims were located in Palm Beach, where the mood is especially grim as wealthy retirees account for their losses. [NYT, WSJ]
• The Madoff saga isn't the only outrageous scheme to have been revealed in recent days, of course. The Times' report over the weekend on how Marc Dreier duped the likes of Sheldon Solow and the bank Perella Weinberg. [NYT]

Oh God SHUT UP: Your company/industry/economy did not fail because of a "perfect storm," a chance, disastrous combination of outside events. It failed because you sucked!

Time for an up-to-date roundup on the nifty story of Bernie Madoff, the Wall Street titan accused yesterday of running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Bathrobes! Big shots! And plenty of broke Jews, below!