As we surmised as recently as two weeks ago in our Death Watch summary, Smurfit Stone container finally caved and early this morning filed for Chapter 11. Surprisingly, the company managed to procure a $750 million DIP financing. Granted of this $400 million is merely a replacement of the existing A/R securitization facility, but it is still an impressive accomplishment even though the company does have a lot of hard assets.

Nothing too exciting in the Jan 27 roundup. Not surprisingly, of 11 markets, 9 are offers and the two lonely bids are for a paltry $500k in Horseman Global, and for a more impressive $10 MM in Allan Teh's Kamunting Street. On the ask-side, there is $58 million of selling interest, split among Linden, Aristea, Polygon, Whitebox, Harbinger, Indus and Impala (the last one people can't seem to sell enough of).

In surely a harbinger of many more such episodes to come, Ryan Brinkerhoff, 24, apparently lost his mind last night, and tried to set fire to the 34th floor of 7 World Trade Center.

Nobody could have possibly foreseen this.

New York State has presented this chart to highlight the massacre that was also known as bonus season. Silver lining (not for NY) - banks wont have to pay taxes "for years to come" due to $31.4 billion in tax credits.

Some other points from the report:

The Council on Foreign Relations has done a great independent analysis of who has been buying U.S. Treasuries in 2008. In a nutshell, the US managed to place $1.3 trillion of USTs with non-Chinese investors.