The announcement that FGIC is looking to break itself into 2 separate businesses isn’t being greeted with joy.  There are problems with doing this and some believe the lawsuits will be abundant.  Just add those lawsuits to the subprime lawsuits that are growing by the day.   Need more troubling news?  This article in MarketWatch concerns auction-rate securities :   

J.P. Morgan analysts said Thursday they anticipated the costs from some of these funds, which had issued auction-rate securities as a source of cheap financing, could increase after the market for these securities nearly dried up.

"The cost of leverage will rise for closed-end funds," J.P. Morgan analysts Kenneth Worthington and Timothy Shea wrote in a report, noting that these higher costs "should weigh on returns."

Closed-end funds are different from their cousins, mutual funds, because they do not continuously offer shares for sale. Firms such as Eaton Vance Corp. (EV), Nuveen Investments, Calamos Advisors and BlackRock Inc. (BLK)  manage closed-end funds that have used the auction-rate market for a source of funding. They’ve done this by issuing what’s known as auction-rate preferred shares.

"Auction failures means this preferred market may go away," the analysts said

Citgroup (C) is said to be selling or closing some Asian, European and Latin American operations, according the the WSJ.

And just one more happy note:  Canada’s December wholesale sales: M/M -2.9% v prior 0.2%.  I’m not reading that as a good thing.