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Elsewhere on Tuesday:

What if you woke up one morning and had 615 million more mouths to feed? And your fridge? It’s half-empty. This is the dilemma for Merrill Lynch’s John Thain

The year-long credit crisis has forced plenty of bank lieutenants to follow or precede their bosses out the door. But a handful in both the US and Europe have, somehow, survived.

…this isn’t about a man who made a mistake and had an affair. It is a story about a man who said he was helpless against the destruction that can be wrought by aggressive campaigns on the internet.

The herd mentality was alive and quite evident in the trading of Wachovia Corp. shares Monday. All it took was one note from Morgan Keegan analyst Robert Patten, who did not change his underperform rating on the shares, but merely noted that the recent rally was more than likely attributable to short-covering, and therefore, not entirely warranted.

Sign of the times: those spam messages urging me to invest in this or that stock “which is going to EXPLODE!” that were so common a year ago seem to have disappeared.

Economist Rankings : On the Wu-index, Andrei Shleifer is clearly Top Dog, with 14 papers having at least 140 citations. Lucas, Barrow, and Bernanke are in joint second place, each with 12 papers having at least 120 citations (courtesy of Portfolio.com).

After reading the [Forbes] piece on Jimmy Cayne, you get the impression of Cayne as a vindictive, ungrateful, out-of-touch executive who’s more willing to lay the blame for Bear’s demise at the feet of Goldman Sachs than he is to fly commercial, even in an emergency

The [UK] government is to inject up to £3bn of new equity capital into Northern Rock. Or to put it another way, the nationalised bank is having a mega rights issue that taps its one shareholder. The way to see it is as a tweaking by the government of its promise that all those taxpayer loans would be repaid.

This nearly in: the back-story behind Boston Red Sox owner [and mega hedgie] John Henry’s rare — well, in public — hissy-fit that last week culminated in first ballot Hall of Fame slugger “Manny being Manny” Ramirez finally being shipped to Los Angeles in exchange for a bag of used baseballs.

Never trust banks who say: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be careful’