Remember Wall Street analysts? Those are the people who go on tout TV and tell you to buy stocks regardless of what is happening to stock prices. The reason you should ignore them is that they get paid to make you buy stocks which generates commissions for their employer. If they issue 'sell' recommendations, they will scare people away from the market. And then there won't be any commissions to pay them.

This comes to mind courtesy of some fresh statistics on analysts' rate of issuing buy recommendations as stocks have plummeted in the last year. When stocks hit their peak in 2007, analysts put buy or hold calls on stocks 95% of the time. And last month, history's worst January, analysts urged you to sell a mere 5.9% of stocks. In 2008, as the market lost almost 40%, sells never outweighed buys or holds.

ClusterStock has put together a countdown of the biggest financial losers of 2008.

The results aren't too surprising: Executives at big banks with large stock holdings lost huge chunks of their fortunes. Former Citigroup (NYSE: C) head Sandy Weill saw his net worth plunge from $1.8 billion to $1.3 billion, and former Lehman head Richard Fuld lost about $1 billion.

But before you feel too bad, it's important to remember that these guys were playing with the house's money. As CEOs, they received huge stock and option grants as part of their compensation -- it's not like they ever paid cash for any of their shares, with the exception of the occasional token insider buying. No matter how you look at it, these guys were paid enormous amounts of money while destroying other people's wealth.

Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and Ted Poe sent a letter to new Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner last week asking that he demand that Citigroup (NYSE: C) withdraw from its 20-year, $400 million contract for the naming rights to the New York Mets stadium.

"At Citigroup, 50,000 people will lose their jobs. Yet in the boardroom of Citigroup, spending $400 million to put a name on stadium seems like a good idea," said Kucinich. "The Treasury Department, which forced Citigroup corporate executives to give up their private jet, should also demand that Citigroup cancel its $400 million advertisement at the Mets field and instead begin to repay their debt to the taxpayers."

If a $400 million naming rights contract from a company that's on government welfare doesn't seem ludicrous to you, it should. The notion that the $20 million per year will generate enough earnings for the company to offset the cost is a pretty silly one.

But maybe there's a compromise: Since all of us provided cash to Citigroup, maybe it should be given a name that's a tribute to grotesque mismanagement at the company: "Citigroup's Arrogance Arena" perhaps? Or how about "Failed Bank Field." The possibilities are endless, and definitely something that should be put in an online poll with one vote per taxpayer. If we're going to bail out the banks and still let them buy naming rights to baseball fields, we should at least have some fun with it.

One of the questions that I spent this week discussing is this: What was Wall Street thinking? Whether it's using taxpayer money to pay itself $18.4 billion in bonuses or to buy a $50 million corporate jet after posting $35 billion in losses, people are wondering whether Wall Street gets it. The answer is yes. Wall Street gets that nobody stopped it from paying bonuses when it took our money, so it took what it could. Unless we limit how Wall Street spends taxpayer money, it will keep paying itself big bonuses.

Wall Street is a place where the people at the top are trained to grab as much as they can out of the hands of the other graspers. At least $200 billion worth of TARP money went to Wall Street with no strings attached. If you put that much money into the hands of a culture that believes firmly in taking what it can get -- it usually pays half of its revenues to employees -- you end up with Wall Street taking as much as it can from the taxpayers.

Just like the government's tardy recognition of the recession, nine months after the fact, Washington has become embarrassed over and over again by the scandalous behavior of Wall Street investment banks and corporate executives. This includes: overindulgent life styles at company, shareholder, and taxpayer expense; outrageous bonuses by money losing companies; corporate jets; lavish business retreats; gaming of stock options and more.

Our nation has been strip-mined by corporate executives that think short term, focus on themselves instead of their company, and people they represent, and have been negligent to consider the repercussions of their actions or inaction.

Strip-mining allows for the removal of minerals in the fastest and easiest way possible grabbing at surface material as you work your way down and cause havoc to the ecosystem. Environmental problems are of great concern now more than ever and the process is heavily regulated -- more so than the economic strip mining of the last few years.

Since Washington is so affected by lobbyists whose interests are not aligned with the overall public well-being (note: I did not say welfare), as the cynic would say "the best government money can buy", the public is not getting its monies worth.

Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) may cut 5% of its workforce. Given the drop-off in investment banking activity and asset management, the number may not be high enough, but it is a start. Wall Street is still worried about the bank's future, as its stock price shows. Shares change hands at $21, down more than 50% during that last year. Morgan is doing better than some other companies in its sector, but the deepening recession could hurt earnings more than last year.

According to The Wall Street Journal (subscription requited), "The New York firm, which let go of about 7,000 employees last year, may decide on another round of staffing cuts in the next two weeks."

You've asked people to give you ideas, so here's one: Don't recycle Bush's failed ideas and expect them to work. Each of those failed ideas has deep flaws. Instead, if you have to save the banking system -- and I would like to see how things would work if companies and people lived within their means rather than borrowing to pay for things that they can't afford -- then cull and capitalize or create new banks.

Here's what's wrong with the three recycled Bush ideas being floated:

It takes quite a bit to make our new president angry, but a New York Times report saying that Wall Street paid $18.4 billion in bonuses last year as companies teetered on the brink of collapse did the trick.

Speaking to reporters in Washington, President Obama seemed livid at the financial services industry. He called the payouts "the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful."

Wall Street might want to forgo bonuses for everybody. That's Obama's view and it is probably shared by the majority of the American people. Vice President Joe Biden told CNBC that he wants to lock up Wall Street bad guys.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner already had to twist Citigroup Inc.'s (NYSE:C) arm to "change its mind" about buying a corporate jet. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is investigating bonuses paid by Merrill Lynch before its acquisition by Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC). Then, of course, there are the shenanigans at American International Group Inc. (NYSE: AIG).

Just when you think you've heard it all, you hear more. In the last year, Wall Street -- or more specifically, the brokerage units of New York financial companies -- lost $35 billion. (Worldwide, financial institutions have taken $1 trillion in write-offs of bad assets). Those firms received a large proportion of the $350 billion TARP and persuaded the Treasury to guarantee losses from hundreds of billions worth of their financial toxic waste. Their reward? $18.4 billion in bonuses.

How much of the TARP went to paying for those bonuses? The banks have cleverly neglected to report that. But let's face it -- money is fungible. So if they did not use the money from the deposits they received from the Treasury to pay bonuses, our tax dollars freed up cash they may have had from other sources that did go to paying those $18.4 billion in bonuses.

An era of greed that began with the election of Ronald Reagan has come to an abrupt end. That means that the seething emotions of greed and envy that come along with bonus time at investment banks will have fewer dollars attached to them. And talent will flow to government and academia rather than Wall Street. This could be good for the U.S.

Some of those masters of the universe in the investment banking industry have seen the value of their stock tumble (and many of them are going without bonuses this year). Here are some of the "casualties":

Remember when we were up in arms over the $700 billion taxpayer-funded bailout of the banking industry?

Those were the days. With the government now mulling the establishment of an "aggregator bank" to buy all the bad assets of all the banks, former International Monetary Fund chief economist Simon Johnson says that the cost of the bailout could be $4 trillion by the time this is done.

Four trillion dollars is a lot of lettuce. To help put it in perspective consider this. As of July of 2008, the CIA estimated the US population at 303,824,640. If the total cost of the bailout comes to $4 trillion, that will work out to a bill of $13,165.49 for every man, woman, child and incarcerated felon in America.

What does it all mean? I'm not really sure. But given that you (more precisely, your great-great-great-great grandchildren) are cutting a check for more than $13,000 to the financial industry, don't you think that we are perhaps entitled to a higher level of customer service? Could they upgrade the quality of the lollipops, perhaps?

Wall Street analysts seemed to have thrown up their hands when it comes to fourth quarter earnings. Given the current economic environment, who can blame them?

Earnings estimates are almost useless. They have ranges big enough to drive a truck through. No, make that a train. I mean a tank. Imagine a large mode of transportation and you get the idea. My colleague Douglas McIyntyre recently argued "that has changed so much in the last two quarters that predictions have become hard to make and going into this earnings season the job may become impossible."

Take General Electric Co. (NYSE:GE). The conglomerate, which has been in Wall Street's dog house forever, is expected to post earnings of 52 cents for the fourth quarter. Or, the parent company of NBC might earn 36 cents. Everyone is sure that Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C) is a basket case but exactly how screwed up the company is a matter of debate. Analysts are forecasting a losses of 47 cents to $1.14 per share.

Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) could earn anywhere from 18 cents and 33 cents. Analysts' estimates for JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) range from a profit of 25 cent to a loss of 20 cents. Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE), which recently announced it would fire 800 scientists, may earn anywhere between 55 cents and 63 cents.

It's pretty obvious -- but not certain -- that Citigroup (NYSE: C) will report a worse-than-anticipated fourth quarter loss. Otherwise, why would there be so much discussion about selling Smith Barney, replacing Citi's Chairman Win Bischoff with Dick Parsons, former Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) Chairman, and maybe dumping current Citi CEO Vikram Pandit? The way the game is played, it looks better to be making changes prior to the announcement of bad numbers rather than after it.

But after losing $10 billion in the first three quarters of 2008, Citi appears poised to add not $2 billion but as much as $10 billion in losses to that total. Of course, the board is expressing confidence in Pandit's first year of leadership at Citi. He's been able to convince the government to cough up $45 billion in cash and guarantees on $269 billion of illiquid mortgage assets. And he might be able to sell Citi's share of Smith Barney to Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) for $2.5 billion in cash which would create a $6 billion after-tax gain.

The key threat for Pandit appears to be that Rubin -- who left Citi after a decade in which he took in $126 million as an advisor while Citi lost $164 billion in market value -- was a Pandit supporter. With Rubin gone, Parsons, who is Citi's lead director, has been weighing Pandit's future. The New York Times reports that Parsons has "met privately with several of the bank's top executives for lengthy discussions about their businesses, and in some cases, Pandit's management style."

If Citi announces a $20 billion loss, will it also announce Pandit's replacement?

Peter Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates. He also teaches management at Babson College and is the author of You Can't Order Change: Lessons from Jim McNerney's Turnaround at Boeing. He owns Citi shares and has no financial interest in the other securities mentioned.

The Wall Street Journal says that Citigroup (NYSE:C) CEO Vikram Pandit has the support of the board. That is even with the bank likely to lose another $10 billion in the most recent quarter. Over at The New York Times, the business desk sees Citi sacking its chairman. "Federal banking regulators are pressing Citigroup to shake up its board and replace its chairman, Winfried F. W. Bischoff, in an effort to restore confidence in the beleaguered financial giant."

Since Pandit and Bischoff have overlapped during much of their time in power, the division of blame does not make a great deal of sense.

It would appear the government and board at the bank want to show that someone was punished for Citi's performance. Director Robert Rubin has already left. That was apparently not enough of a sacrifice. The reality of the matter is that the whole board and most of management have been part of the Citi strategic decision-making process for the last year to two years. There is plenty of responsibility to go around.

It sounds like Bischoff is gone. But, it is just a little theater. He did not do anything special except to sit on a board with a number of people who made a remarkable number of mistakes.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Since the stock market is down so much I have been buying something in the fourth quarter almost every week. I have been patient and have been expanding my watch list. The difficulty for me is that I feel like almost everything is on sale -- but is everything a bargain?

Maybe not; maybe I'm delusional. Perhaps that is because I am tuned into another time and place when I would have been dancing in the streets if I were able to acquire Anglo American ADR (NASDAQ: AAUK) or General Electric (NYSE: GE) for pennies on the dollar. Maybe that is all these stocks are worth? That is what Wall Street currently thinks. That is what Main Street currently thinks. There is a lot more bad news than good.

Then why is Warren Buffett buying, and Carl Icahn and Ken Heebner? After all, I'm just following in their shadows.

The reason is that most investors are simply focused on all the bad news. That is what has most folks' attention and that is making the market -- bankruptcies, billions of dollars in losses, government out of control, Wall Street out of control and more. There is also serious fear things will get worse. If you lost money in the stock market (all of us), or lost your job or your house or any combination of the above, then things look bleak and for now they are. However, we should not be investing for now; we should be investing for the future.

Consider the following elements that support a recovery in the next year. I do not mean a boom, just a recovery -- just a more positive investing environment.

1) By spring it is estimated the government will have poured $2 trillion dollars into an economy of $13 trillion over a 12-month period. Not only is this a market stimulus, but it may prove to be highly inflationary, and if so equities are a better place to be then cash.