CIT CEO Jeff Peek and wife Liz

If people were pissed off about AIG's temporary decline and permanent bonuses, CIT's bankruptcy ought to enrage them.

The giant lender to businesses is heading for a quick in-and-out in bankruptcy court, and when it emerges, taxpayers will be the ones who have gotten the ol' in-out: CIT won't have to repay its $2.33 billion TARP bailout.

CIT's been in deep trouble for way more than a year. Meanwhile, some of its execs have reaped special bonuses. Its H.R. director, Jim Duffy, has received a $450,000 cash bonus for what the company called his "exceptional performance." What did he do? "Mr. Duffy's achievements in 2008 include the design and implementation of a process to reduce our total headcount by 22% ... along with the successful deployment of talent and development programs targeted at retaining CIT's key talent," according to CIT's proxy filing last April. That message to taxpayers was approved by CEO Jeff Peek.

Great chart from the Awl on the downward (to say the least) trend of major newspapers since 1990. Except for the Wall Street Journal.

The value of the chart? Daily papers have been plummeting ever more rapidly for two decades, not just in recent times and before bloggers took over.

No wonder the Chicago Sun-Times was just purchased for a measly $5 million in cash from bankruptcy court.

Philadelphia Inquirer staffers are maintaining a sense of humor about their bankrupt paper — even if their mood is getting darker and darker. The headline atop today's Jobbing column: "Prevent workplace deaths. Lay off workers."

The Inquirer is being drawn and quartered by various creditors, and its takeover by a real-estate mogul seems imminent. (Read the paper's own story here.) The Inquirer's already been shredded by layoffs, like almost every other paper. So if Jobbing columnist Jane Von Bergen's lead paragraph on a story abut workplace fatalities sounds a little breathless, maybe she just climbed down from a ledge:

The report and its accompanying statistical breakdowns indicate that no CEOs recently jumped off buildings or were shot to death in their corner offices.

Stocks Drop in Global Pullback; U.S. Economy Is Still Sputtering (WashPost)

Reaction from one investment strategist: ""Whether it's the facts catching up with the expectations or the expectations catching up with the facts, I'm not sure which." You can those words to the bank. WSJ speculation, Telegraph (U.K.) on fears that rally's over; Seeking Alpha's The Mole on the bear.

Foreclosures Rise With Unemployment Rate (WashPost)

"The country's growing unemployment is overtaking subprime mortgages as the main driver of foreclosures, threatening to send even higher the number of borrowers who will lose their homes and making the foreclosure crisis far more complicated to unwind." In the first quarter, prime foreclosures outnumbered subprime ones.

Squeaking by on $300,000 (WashPost)

Droll profile of one Laura Steins in ritzy NYC suburb Harrison: "[S]he's months overdue for a visit to her colorist, a telltale sign of economic distress for a woman such as Steins."

Fox News on pace for best year ever (AP)

Sailing on its swift boat with its three Gilligans — little buddies Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity — Fox has seen its viewership rise 11 percent from last year. CNN and MSNBC are down.

MORE HEADLINES FOLLOW

More than 126,000 U.S. consumers filed for bankruptcy last month, 34 percent more than in July 2008. No matter how (relatively) well the stock market's doing, personal bankruptcies are still soaring out of control.

Celebrities Stephen Baldwin and Lenny Dykstra (if you can call them celebrities) filed for bankruptcy last month. After you finish browsing this list of other celebrity bankruptcies, just realize that even if you're not bankrupt, you stand to pay higher and higher fees to banks, which are losing money on loans and so are more than ever focusing on new and higher fees to squeeze money out of those members of the public who aren't yet broke.

Who knows how high the bankruptcy rate would be if Congress hadn't made it much tougher back in 2005 for the average person to file for bankruptcy?

A perfect mediocrity with a .500 record at the All-Star break, the Chicago Cubs are doing even worse off the field: To finish the planned sale of the team, the Cubs "may become the first Major League Baseball team in 39 years to file for bankruptcy."

After only 40 days wandering in the desert of bankruptcy court, GM "completed a major step in its turnaround," selling its good assets to something that lawyers call Vehicle Acquisition Co., soon to be renamed General Motors Co. The "bad" assets — not all of them are so bad, considering that legitimate, genuine claims for earned money, like pensions and unpaid bills, are among them — still rest on the scrap heap, compacted into something that lawyers call Motors Liquidation Co.

The only person guaranteed to squeeze sizable money from GM is disgraced ex-CEO Rick Wagoner, whose exit package is being negotiated with more respect being shown to him than to GM's creditors and employees.

Now the taxpayers own a new GM that's just a shell of the old one, so good luck competing on the world market. Inside the shell is a shriveled company that will sell you a Chevy or Caddy and little else, and it will do it without thousands of its old dealers.

"Leaner, more focused" — that's how the Wall Street Journal describes the new entity. The hype is extraordinary this morning, with wire services gushing that "a leaner and meaner automaker [is] ready to win back American consumers and pay back taxpayers." Yeah, and undercoating is worth paying extra for.

Time to return to the important business on the Street: the bonus recovery. "AIG Seeks Clearance For More Bonuses," reports the WashPost:

While figures finally show that China has sped ahead of the U.S. as the world's biggest automaker, GM's failed CEO Rick Wagoner is still hanging onto a job (raking in his full benefits, plus a token $1 salary), waiting for the government to figure out his pension plan.

A touchy subject, a "delicate issue," that pension plan. But the two big bankrupt U.S. automakers, GM and Chrysler, are both still saddled with bigger pension problems: having to fund them for thousands and thousands of other employees. CNN Money has good background here on the pension plights of GM's workers and the company itself.

As you prepare to hit the streets and fire your rifles into the air to celebrate the expected quick emergence of GM from bankruptcy, keep this in mind:

The "new GM" — to be known as "GM" — will still get off scot-free "from liability for consumer claims related to incidents that occurred before GM went into bankruptcy protection."

People who have already filed claims are shit out of luck; think of yourselves as crash-test dummies.

Its U.S. sales plunged 34.6 percent in June, and Fitch downgraded its ratings.

That bad news comes only a couple of days after reports of an upsurge of complaints about costly headlight problems on older Prius models. A lawsuit claims "a dangerous but undisclosed safety defect."