Five things you should know this morning:
• You do not want to have your money in the stock market at 9:30 a.m. We are sorry we did not tell you to take it out yesterday afternoon. It is okay, just hang on, your value will return eventually. Close your eyes and ride it out and curse George Bush for idiotically promising that there will be "panic" and "crisis" if no bailout happened immediately. Now there is panic! There are few who would question that he is now officially the worst president ever. It is, after all, the Republicans who are refusing to approve the modified, more controlled version of his bailout plan.
• Washington Mutual was the largest bank failure in U.S. history: Its $307 billion of assets and $188 billion of deposits were sold to JP Morgan for a bargain of $1.8 billion. JP Morgan is on the ball—they have already seized WaMu's website.
• "The situation is like that movie trailer where a guy with a deep, scary voice says, 'In a world where credit markets are frozen, where banks refuse to lend to each other at any price, only one man, with one plan can save us,'" said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute in Washington."
• Why are tape-recordings of Harvey Weinstein and Quentin Tarantino from the mid-90s floating around and being mined for decade-old gossip in Page Six? That's suspicious. Also, Jackie Brown was a really good movie.
• The invulnerable New York City real estate market is vulnerable: home prices down, foreclosures up.