"Very aggressive policy."

Over dinner on Tuesday night, that's what New York University economics professor Nouriel Roubini told me was required for a "U" shaped economic recovery "rather than a Japanese-like 'L' into oblivion. He puts the odds of a "U" at two-thirds and an "L" at only one-third, if these further policy actions take place. Such a voluble bear coming down in favor of a "U" should be welcome news to the crushed investment community.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke must have been eavesdropping on our conversation. The very next day, Bernanke did promulgate some "very aggressive action" indeed--another trillion dollars or so to be poured into the mortgage-backed and Treasury securities in a bold attempt to free the credit markets. Wall Street loved Bernanke's move, extending the stock market gains here and abroad and driving interest rates on Treasury securities and mortgage-backed bonds lower. Hope alights again for housing as mortgage interest rates have been driven down to 4.79%, which should help to thin the gargantuan inventory of unsold homes.

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Now it is time for Aggressive Action II from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. It must be a decisive and clear creation of a "good bank/bad bank" arrangement to get rid of the albatross around the necks of Citigroup (nyse: C - news - people ), Wells Fargo (nyse: WFC - news - people ), JPMorgan Chase (nyse: JPM - news - people ) and Bank of America (nyse: BAC - news - people ), for starters.

Roubini believes it is crucial to break up the big banks into three or four parts each, so that they can be better managed. "If you're too big to fail," he says, "then you're too big, period." If Geithner comes through with a clear, aggressive, bold and easy-to-understand program for the banks, his star will rise, and so will the bank share-led rally in this bear market. All eyes are on Uncle Sam.

There is a wonderful precedent of how a "good bank/bad bank" solution can rebuild debilitated capital structures in financial institutions. In 1988, John Vogelstein, a brilliant partner at E.M. Warburg Pincus & Co., together with Wachtell Lipton law partner Martin Lipton, was able to restore stability to Mellon Bank and make a profit of $1 billion by separating the terrible assets from the promising ones. It was the first non-assisted recapitalization of a major commercial bank, and out of it grew one of the nation's top 25 bank holding companies. Mellon's bad assets were put into a bad bank at a discount of 25% to 30%, and over an extended period of time, the stream of income net of interest from these assets brought exactly the value that Vogelstein had predicted. Warburg Pincus made $1 billion on its 20% interest from a bank that was losing $300 million on a balance sheet of only $750 million.

Mr. Geithner, please note that Mr. Vogelstein is still affiliated with Warburg Pincus and can be reached at (212) 878-0601.

The traditional advice about building a Web site was to spend a lot of time in advance planning its organization, ensuring that all the inside pages fit together in a logical hierarchy. Next, navigation aids were placed on the home page, so that the routes to all that inside content were intuitive and readily apparent. And since first impressions are as important online as off, lots of time and effort should be spent designing the home page, as it would be the first thing your visitors would see.

No one is now saying that Web layouts should be complicated, or Web site design shouldn't be attractive. But because of search engines, users end up never encountering that home page or availing themselves of the careful arrangement of the site's material.

Instead, they're taken directly to the inside page that has the specific material they are looking for. And once they find what they're looking for, they're off somewhere else.

What that means, says Jerry Sheehan of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, is that Web developers shouldn't sweat the details of how a site is pieced together, since Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) will only end up hiding a lot of that work from many, if not most, Web users.

"We are stuck designing for the total user experience," Sheehan says. "But in fact, the actual user experience is to simply come and get something, and then go. The natural predilection is to spend lots of time working on the right design. But we might be better off taking 20% of that effort and using it to come up with 20% more content for the site."

Sheehan's institute helps state agencies get help from academia to undertake technology projects more complex than they could by themselves. He said he developed his new approach to Web design by looking at the traffic on his group's own Web site, and noticing that many visitors came directly from Google to an inside page, without ever bothering to check out the other parts of the site.

Is the internet going down? Undersea sub-cables have just broken...

Breaking news: something's happening to the internet, right now. We're just not quite sure what.

Interoute, the internet networks company, reports that three of the four internet sub-cables that run from Asia to North America have been damaged.

These carry more than 75 per cent of traffic between the Middle East, Europe and America. It's hard to gather what this actually means - is it that the internet is down or (more likely) significantly slower than usual between the Middle East and America? (If you're reading this, let's face it, the internet has not shut down altogether)

But, according to the company, there is a domino effect taking place. Interoute says it is:

hearing that offices have lost their entire private network connectivity. As a result, users are unable to do their daily job over the internet and are turning to their mobile phones to communicate across the globe. This is having a knock on effect on the domestic voice networks, which are getting a surge of calls needing to be routed internationally. These calls need to be routed onto international gateways that pass voice traffic in longer directions around the world to avoid the cable breaks – causing more quality issues and risk more call failures, in turn causing more calls to be placed and increasing the pressure on local voice networks.

What (I think) this means is that companies' private internet services have gone down. So, if they can get access, they have had to go on the public internet and mobile phones, like the rest of us average joes, to get their work done. That results in more strain on mobile phone networks, which means more phone calls go down and the internet becomes slower.

Here's the big problem right now:

Finance companies [are] looking to settle trades on European and American exchanges. This cable outage means there is no real-time access to, for example, trading ticker services. This means branch offices are compromised when trying to place trades. As private networks are being affected, these organisations are forced to rely on public internet services that may have more latency and may not update as quickly. The loss of time even precious seconds is hugely important to trading exchanges. These public internet services are now struggling to cope with peak in demand – leading to increased latency, and further compromising the integrity of the trading data.

I'm told that these major sub-sea cables break once a year. So companies have developed a fall-back plan. If one sub-sea cable is out, traffic is re-routed onto a second cable. In theory, a dual break, where both cables go out at once, is incredibly rare. Prior to January this year, it had not happened before.

The problem with all of this is that it's hard to see the impact, or its significance, until something disastrous happens. So, we're keeping an eye on it and like we said, er, something's happening to the internet.

Despite an investment boom, GDP growth is hurt by falling E.U. demand for the nation's exports.

Economic reforms and European Union membership have generated an investment boom in Slovakia's manufacturing, construction and service sectors. Gross domestic product growth peaked at 10.4% in 2007 as new automobile and electronic plants started full-scale production.

However, Slovakia's performance is tied closely to E.U. demand for its exports, and the slowdown in E.U. growth is starting to be felt in Slovakia. The Statistical Office reported GDP growth in the third quarter slowing to 7% year-on-year after 9.3% and 7.6% in the first and second quarters, respectively. The government estimates that the economy will grow by 4.7% in 2009, with export growth slowing from 10% in 2008 to 5.9%. Recent data do not yet fully reflect the impact of the crisis, and some fear that growth could slow below 4%.

Anti-crisis package. Prime Minister Robert Fico argues that higher domestic consumption will help Slovakia get through the crisis and perhaps reverse disturbing trends in employment. Accordingly, the government has drafted a package of new economic measures to stimulate demand. These include completing a nuclear power station on the Bohunice site and using public-private partnerships to build new roads and expand Bratislava's Stefanik airport. The government also seeks to reform the labor market and provide loans to small and medium-sized enterprises.

Euro perspective. Meanwhile, Standard & Poor's 500 and Moody's have upgraded Slovakia's sovereign rating from A to A+. They cite Slovakia's modest debt burden, investment-oriented policies and the switch to the euro in January 2009.

Critics have argued that Slovakia is needlessly surrendering control over monetary policy and setting itself up for high inflation due to the switch-over. However, the timing for euro adoption now looks fortunate:

--The drive for the euro has meant long-term fiscal frugality and restrained the spending desires of Slovakia's left-leaning government.

--Slovakia's relatively low fiscal deficit of 2.25% of GDP in 2008 has reduced its need to borrow during the global financial crisis.

With sales slumping, Japanese company will cut 8,000 jobs in electronics division and slash investment.

South Korea's economic growth was slower in the third quarter than originally estimated, the central bank said Tuesday, further evidence that Asia's fourth-largest economy is being hit by the global meltdown.

Gross domestic product grew 3.8 percent in the three months ended Sept. 30 compared with the same period last year, revised down from the preliminary 3.9 percent expansion announced in October, the Bank of Korea said.

The bank also said that the economy expanded 0.5 percent in the third quarter from the previous three months, down from October's estimate of 0.6 percent growth.

Economists have been lowering their 2009 growth estimates for South Korea given its exposure to the global economic slowdown as a major exporting nation. The economy is expected to slow considerably, with some even predicting it could experience its first contraction in more than a decade.

The official revision to third-quarter economic growth came one day after the government announced that exports fell in November by the most in nearly seven years and automakers took steps to cut production as vehicle demand slumps amid the weak global economy.

Exports dropped 18.3 percent in November from the same month last year to $29.26 billion, the Ministry of Knowledge Economy said. Imports fell 14.6 percent to $28.97 billion for a trade surplus of $297 million.

The ministry cited economic doldrums overseas related to the world financial crisis for the decline in exports. Falling prices for crude oil and other natural resources reduced the value of imports.

The ministry said that exports of South Korean auto-related products slumped 30.8 percent in November.

The November fall in exports was the biggest since December 2001 when they slid 20.4 percent, according to Kang Myung-soo, a ministry official.

Separately, the South Korean unit of General Motors Corp. began an extended production shutdown at one of its four domestic plants.

Production at GM Daewoo Auto & Technology Co.'s No. 2 plant in the city of Bupyeong, near Seoul, stopped Monday as planned and will not resume until Jan. 5, according to Park Hae-ho, a company spokesman. GM Daewoo plans to close down three other plants from Dec. 22 through Jan. 4.

The company is South Korea's third-largest automaker, trailing Hyundai Motor Co. and Kia Motors Corp.

Hyundai, meanwhile, said Monday it was slashing overtime for the first time since 1998.

Spokesman Ki Jin-ho said that the company had decided there was no need for overtime work and weekend shifts in December at six of the company's seven plants in South Korea amid weak overseas and domestic demand.

The Campbell Soup Co. says its first-quarter profit fell 3.7 percent, but its sales rose as people bought more condensed soup.

The company said Monday it earned $260 million, or 71 cents per share in the quarter ended Nov. 2. That compares to $270 million, or 70 cents per share, a year earlier.

The Camden-based soupmaker says its sales rose 3 percent to $2.25 billion for the quarter, from $2.19 billion. Campbell's says condensed soup sales rose 14 percent in the quarter.

Excluding one-time items, such as restructuring costs and losses on commodity hedges, the company would have earned $281 million, or 77 cents per share.

The company says it expects to be hurt in the fiscal year by unfavorable exchange rates.

Hedge funds shoring up cash on redemption fears appear to drive sell-off.

Wall Street morphed an afternoon rally into a crashing close on Friday.

Observers attributed at least some of the unrest to forced selling by hedge-fund managers as jittery investors pull their money out of the vehicles.

Hogan, chief market analyst at Jefferies, said the afternoon increase was spurred by comments from U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson on the use of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. (See "The U.S. Turns On A Dime.")

"It felt better to hear Paulson explain some of the head-scratchers to us, but the overreaching feeling on the market though is there's a great deal of pressure from folks going to see some redemptions," Jefferies said. "November 15 is an important date, and hedge funds are selling stocks to raise cash."

By the end of the day, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 3.8%, or 337.94 points, to 8,497.31, while the Nasdaq composite index tumbled 5.0%, or 79.85 points, to 1,516.85, and the S&P 500 index dropped 4.2%, or 38.00 points, to 873.29. The yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note fell to 3.73% from 3.82% Thursday.

Citigroup (nyse: C - news - people )'s share managed to stay in positive territory, closing up 0.7%, or 7 cents, to $9.52. (See "At Citi, Pandit Calls For Calm.") On Friday, a news report surfaced that 10,000 job cuts would hit Citi's rank and file next week. Other reports had the bank cutting 10.0% of worldwide jobs through layoffs, divestitures and attrition. Citi has 352,000 employees.

In a memorandum Friday afternoon obtained by Forbes.com, the embattled Pandit invited all employees to a Monday morning "town hall" meeting. He also sought to reassure Citi's hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide that Citi's "capital is plentiful, we have abundant liquidity and our revenue is strong."

The broader financial sector didn't do as well as Citi. By the end of the day the Financial Select Sector SPDR (nyse: XLF - news - people )exchange-traded fund fell 5.1%, or 68 cents, to $12.73.

The retail sector hasn't looked so bad in years. In addition to the U.S. Commerce Department reporting the largest monthly drop in retail sales on record, Abercrombie & Fitch (nyse: ANF - news - people ), J.C. Penny (nyse: JCP - news - people ), along with others, warned that their earnings will come in below Wall Street's already-meager expectations. (See "Teens Steer Clear Of Abercrombie.")

Bad Economic News Sends Stocks Plummeting

U.S. stocks plunged today as investors locked in profits from yesterday's rally and digested more bad economic news.