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Paul Kedrosky has captured some great statistical data from mint.com about how the average U.S. consumer is faring. In a nutshell - plain horrible.

Straight from the horse's mouth (Aaron Patzer, CEO of Mint):

Breitbart reports that the Feds foiled an attempt by a disgruntled former employee to destroy all the data on Fannie Mae's 4,000 computer servers nationwide.

Dealbreaker reports of an amusing cityfile artile, in which it seems the Financial Times is suing Blackstone scion Stevie of duplex 15/16B at 740 Park, for abusing FT.com login privileges. This is so funny cause it's true for so many.

Spin this:

Yes, this guy is small time, ripping off people for "only" $6.5 million, but his approach is unique.

In an 8-K filed yesterday, Edge Petroleum announced what many had known for a long time, that it may filed for Chapter 11. Earlier the company had hired restructuring law firm Akin Gump to advise on financial and strategic alternatives.

As we discussed previously, the trend of PIKing dividends continues, with Simon Property Group announcing earlier it would pay out its $0.90 quarterly dividend in the form of 10% cash and 90% in kind. The largest mall and shopping center operator is aggressively conserving cash in a scary commercial-mortgage backed environment.

(from Markit)

Let's say you work at Caterpillar and survived the Jan. 26 pinkslipapalooza in which 5,000 got canned... You party, spend a boatload to still have a job, maybe even hit up the Peoria gentleman's establishments... then - ooops, company announces "we were just getting started." Today CAT announced it kinda missed 2,110 people it had planned on sacking but somehow their pink slips got lost in the outbox. This time the layoffs are at the company's Aurora, Decatur and East Peoria facilties. At this rate we assume the next round of pink slips should come in at about 3 days.

Thanks to FT Alphaville for catching these bad boy charts. The article discusses the formation of serial bubbles in housing and equities in most countries except in Japan, where the bubbles were synchronized. And based on a historical ratio of house prices to stock market levels, either real estate still has a long way to drop or markets are due for a significant rally; as to which is more likely, reference any day's headlines.

• GDP: Q4 annualized report out at 8:30 am: Consensus at -5.5%, Actual at -3.8%: someone forget to carry the 1?

• Obama calls bonuses shameful, Dodd to seek legal recourse (Bloomberg)
• Bloomberg to cut $1 billion worth of services to reduce budget (CBS)
• Blagojevich removed from office (

How the mighty have fallen. According to Bloomberg, Fortress (ticker: FIG), which was the first hedge fund to IPO in the heydays of the credit bubble in the summer of 2007 is trying to raise $80 million to fund margin calls associated with its investment in Gagfah, a German residential property operator, as well as two other real estate investment funds, Eurocastle and Nationstar.

In what many expected to be a test of whether financial companies can raise capital without the implicit guarantee of the government, Goldman managed to price $2 billion of non-FDIC insured notes at 500 bps over comparable treasuries. In absolute terms, the notes priced with a 7.5% coupon to yield 7.779%. While the rate is high, the fact that it could even price is notable as all capital raises by financial institutions in recent months were backed by the full faith of the Federal Reserve's printing presses. The pricing is even more remarkable as today GS stock is down a little over 5%.