A few lucky executives at Citigroup (C) received base pay raises this year, but CEO Vikram Pandit isn't among them. The bank announced that it will compensate Pandit exactly $1 for his services, with no stock salary. Last year, the chief executive collected a modest salary (by Wall Street standards) of $958,333.

Meanwhile, Chief Financial Officer John Gerspach's base compensation was hiked from $400,000 to $500,000 effective Nov. 1. James Forese, co-head of global markets, enjoyed an even heftier pay raise -- his base salary jumped from $225,000 to $475,000.

Today was another up-day that started out strong and stayed strong. Retail sales helped trump a weak NY Fed manufacturing number, and Ben Bernanke said he sees no asset bubbles in the US markets today.

Here were today's unofficial closing bell levels:

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To unwind its $45 billion in federal loans, Citigroup (C) has been aggressively selling off non-core assets. For example, the company sold its Japanese brokerage -- Nikko Cordial Securities -- and is even planning to take its Primerica unit public.

The dealmaking has continued. This week, Citigroup has agreed to sell its Bellsystem24 -- a major call center operator -- for $1 billion to Bain Capital LLC. All in all, it's a small deal. But every dollar counts, right?

This deal also highlights another trend; that is, the Japanese market is getting more amenable to buyouts, which is certainly a big shift. After all, Japan tries to avoid huge job losses. Yet, this can make it more difficult to streamline companies.

In fact, the Bellsystem24 transaction was able to get financing from a syndicate of Japanese financial institutions that include Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Mizuho Financial Group and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. No doubt, this is a sign that key players in Japan are willing to make some changes when it comes to buyouts.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook.

Being 34% owned by the U.S. government, Citigroup's (NYSE: C) destiny is somewhat murky. Yet, to pay off the loans, this massive financial institution must shrink. To this end, Citigroup has filed a public offering for its Primerica Financial Services. According to the prospectus, the deal is expected to raise $100 million, but it's likely the amount will be much larger.

Primerica certainly has an interesting history. Back in 1977, an aggressive financial service executive, Arthur Williams, started the company, with the focus on providing term insurance to consumers as well as mutual fund products. However, he had an interesting twist on distribution: he used network marketing. Basically, a Primerica agent would get incentives by recruiting new agents. As a result, the company's growth exploded.

John Reed, the financier who helped engineer the creation of Citigroup (NYSE: C) has a message for investors and taxpayers who are none-to-pleased with his track record of value destruction: My bad!

In an interview with Bloomberg, Reed said "I'm sorry. These are people I love and care about. You could imagine emotionally it's not easy to see what's happened."

He also advocated splitting Citigroup and similar banks into smaller parts to lessen their ability to torpedo the broader economy.

TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer wonders whether the big selloff was caused by anxious managers locking in profits.

What happens if it is was mostly lock-in action? What if the big themes that everyone so feared weren't so big, and that the selloff -- so ugly, with so much damage -- was just technical and remains that way?

Besides my oft-repeated statement that I don't expect a pullback to exceed 7%, I think this market didn't make a lot of sense last week.

Here were the big themes: dollar getting stronger, causing a decline in minerals and resources; industrials faltering; recession stocks roaring back.

Today was mired by awful spending and income data as many are actually now not believing that high GDP figure from yesterday. Earnings were virtually the same as earnings tend to beat estimates but because of cost cutting.

Here were today's unofficial closing bell levels:

Dow 9,710.54 -252.04 (-2.53%)
S&P 500 1,036.01 -30.10 (-2.82%)
Nasdaq 2,045.11 -52.44 (-2.50%)

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I don't think anyone could have had a positive reaction to Bank of America's (NYSE: BAC) third-quarter report, which was released on Friday. According to Bloomberg, management lost $1 billion in the past three months. Big ouch on that one. The financial institution bled 26 cents per diluted share. No earnings beat here, either. Wall Street sent shares down 4.6% by the end of yesterday's trading session.

The year-ago period was a happier time. Back then, Bank of America was rolling in the dough, posting a profit of 15 cents per share. What a difference 12 months makes. Looking at the nine-month record perhaps gives a small amount of comfort to shareholders. The company made 39 cents per diluted share. Of course, that doesn't sit too well next to the $1.09 per diluted share booked in the comparable period. But at least it's not a loss, know what I mean?

Tuesday morning greeted us with earnings from banking behemoth JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM). The company said it earned $3.59 billion and that it nearly doubled the amount of money it saved for loan losses in the third quarter.

Breaking the results down into per-share earnings, JPM trounced the consensus estimate. The bank earned 82 cents per share, nearly double the expected 49 cents per share. Quarterly revenue increased to $26.62 billion from last year's same-quarter revenue of $14.74 billion.

Who does our Treasury Secretary speak to most of the time? Yup. You guessed it. It's the big three bankers.

Who are they? First, we have Lloyd Blankenstein, CEO of Goldman Sachs Group (NYSE GS). Then we have Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Company (NYSE JPM) and then CEO, Vikam Pandt of Citigroup Inc. (NYSE C).

You are probably also wondering how do we know this? The Associated Press did a review of Geithner's calendar under the Freedom of Information Act.

In his first seven months on the job, Geithner made at least 80 contacts with the "big three." Not only that Geithner jumps to the phone when they call. They are the dominant players on Wall Street who can move markets and even economies.

Starting your own business? Need some extra space for your needlepoint habit? You're in luck ... office space comes cheap these days. In fact, rent for office space is sliding lower at the fastest rate since 1995. In the third quarter, office rents dropped 8.5% on a year-over-year basis.

Falling prices typically go hand in hand with falling demand and in fact, vacancies are on the rise as layoffs increase. New York-based real-estate research firm Reis says the office vacancy rate has hit a five-year high of 16.5%. Last quarter, tenants returned 19.6 million square feet of commercial rental space to their landlords.

Analyst upgrades:

• UBS upgraded Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) to Buy from Neutral and raised its target to $265 from $170, citing higher iPhone expectations, new partnerships, and likely upward revisions to Street estimates driven by gross margins.
• Wells Fargo upgraded Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) to Outperform from Market Perform. The firm views a possible deal between end General Electric's (NYSE: GE) NBC Universal positively, as it thinks NBC will provide higher-margin growth for Comcast.
• Janney Montgomery upgraded Michael Baker (AMEX: BKR) to Buy from Neutral after the company completed the sale of its Energy business. The firm raised its target on shares to $46 from $40.
• Jefferies assumed coverage of Endo Pharma (NASDAQ: ENDP) and upgraded the stock to Buy from Hold. The firm cites valuation, a strong base business, and solid cash flow for the upgrade, and has a $30 target price on shares.
• Marten Transport (NASDAQ: MRTN) was upgraded to Overweight from Equal Weight at Stephens.
• U.S. Bancorp (NYSE: USB) was upgraded to Outperform from Market Perform at Keefe Bruyette.

If you're a sixties-style artistic purist, you may want to skip this bit of news -- or at least take a couple tranquilizers first.

Bob Dylan's upcoming "Christmas in the Heart" album will be made available online to Citigroup rewards program customers one week before it hits stores. To be fair, Reuters reports that "Dylan, 68, will donate his proceeds from the Columbia Records release to charities that feed the needy. "

But still. Citigroup and Bob Dylan as partners? It's hard to argue that it's anything other than tacky, although the album does have some fantastic songs on it: "All I want for Christmas is a $700 billion bailout", "A Christmas Overdraft", "The Three Stupid CEOs" (featuring Vikram Pandit on the ukelele and Ken Lewis on the obo) and "God Rest Ye Merry Foreclosure Victims."

Dylan's decision to partner with Citi is puzzling. On the one hand, we can hardly accuse him of greed -- all the money's going to charity.

But it does raise questions about the legend's judgement. Couldn't he have found a less polarizing company to partner with?

Last week, we saw Shanda Games Ltd. (NASDAQ: GAME) raise a cool $1 billion in its IPO.

And today, there was another big-time offering: Talecris Biotherapeutics Holdings picked up $950 in its IPO (issuing 50 million shares at $19 each). This is the second largest IPO of 2009.

Talecris is one of the largest producers/marketers of plasma-derived protein therapies, dealing with things like chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP), primary immune deficiencies (PI), alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, bleeding disorders, and severe trauma.

Out of the chute this morning, the S&P/Case-Shiller index rose 1.2% in July and gave the market a nice uptick for a while. Then came the report from the Conference Board that its consumer confidence index for September fell to 53.1 from 54.5 in August. What was worse is that economists had estimated a rise to 57 for the month. The soft confidence number is almost certainly due to people worried about losing their jobs. Right now, it could be that traders are waiting for Friday's unemployment report before jumping one way or the other. The negative news won out and the indexes traded down most of the day.

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