At a time when many companies are looking for capital to survive, MetLife is going on the offense to capitalize on opportunities.

The life insurer said it would sell 75 million common shares, or about $2.76 billion based on Tuesday’s closing price, to supplement its capital position, money that would be used for both general corporate purposes and potential strategic initiatives.

MetLife CEO Robert Henrikson said he sees a lot of “real opportunities.”

“We are in a position that others are not in,” Henrikson said. “There’s a lot of chop out there, but this is a very exciting time for us … and we intend to take advantage of it.”

But not everyone was thrilled by the prospect of the largest U.S. life insurer using the capital to go on the acquisition trail. Shares in the company, which also withdrew its 2008 earnings guidance and said it plans to cut an unspecified number of jobs, fell some 16 percent, bringing the total decline since the end of September to about 46 percent.

(Photo credit: Reuters)

The common thread in many aggressive rate cutting periods is the suggestion that regulators are “pushing on a piece of string”, meaning lower rates only matter if banks are willing to lend. This is true today, even with global central banks standing united against the evils of contagion and chaos in credit markets. Stock markets looked as though they were getting the hint early on, with Dow, S&P and Nasdaq futures all rising more than 1 percent. 
 
But with a lot of work to do above and beyond rate cuts, capitulating investors may yet keep selling pressure high, particularly as a ban on short selling ends, just before midnight. Having heard nothing from other planets in the solar system, this morning’s coordinated response is pretty clearly the last line of defense. 
 
The latest on the bank merger front, which seems to be eerily at the center of the vortex is the mechanism by which high liquidity and low rates get to the people who need it, the banking system. The Wall Street Journal reports that Citigroup is looking for partners in its contested bid for Wachovia. The gloves come off again tomorrow after a three-day legal hiatus that has kept Wells Fargo and Citi lawyers in the pen while cooler heads try to prevail. Will the global rate-cutting moves be a game changer in the bank consolidation? Dunno. How long is a piece of string? 

Deals of the deals:

* Commonwealth Bank of Australia has agreed to buy British bank HBOS’s Australian unit BankWest for A$2.1 billion ($1.5 billion), below book value, to boost its market share in fast-growing Western Australia, the bank said.

* Tata Consultancy Services, India’s top software services exporter, said it would acquire Citigroup’s back office unit in India for about $505 million in cash.

The mood on Wall Street is somber these days, but the recent market mayhem nonetheless has been fodder for amateur and professional wags who have found a humorous, if not silver, lining in the meltdown. 

With a crisis that has led to shotgun sales of Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, the near collapse of American International Group and the bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual Inc, hundreds of jokes are doing the rounds on blogs, late night comedy shows and email.
 
Here are some samples:
    
Question:  Define a Balance Sheet.
 
Answer:  There are two sides to a Balance Sheet: the Left & the Right (Liabilities and Assets respectively). On the Left side there is nothing right.
 
On the Right side, there is nothing left.

(Doing the rounds on email)

*****

Question: How many stock brokers does it take to change a light bulb?

Answer: Two … one to change the bulb, the other to sell off the old one at the highest price possible before CNBC reports that it’s burned out.

(On the Freakonomics blog of the NY Times Website)

*****

Henry Paulson was out jogging without his guards.
All of a sudden a man with a ski mask jumped out from behind some bushes with a gun.
The masked man said “Give me all your money!”
Unwilling to do so, Paulson said, “You can’t do this, I’m the treasury secretary!”
The man then replied,… “Oh, never mind then.
Give me MY money!”

(Also on the Freakonomics blog of the NY Times Website)

*****

“The economy looks bad. Give you an idea how bad things are, my ATM machine now has a slot-machine lever on it.”

(Jay Leno on NBC’s “Tonight” show)

*****

“How bad is our economy? Well, I’ll give you my two cents, which used to be a dollar.”

(Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report on Comedy Central)

*****

The New Yorker also devoted the cartoons in its Oct. 6 issue to the fallout from the crisis.

In one, a woman at a cocktail party asking a balding man wearing a pinstriped suit, “A banker, eh? Can you make a living at that?”

*****

In a series of cartoons doing the rounds on email, one illustration shows Wall Street executives jumping out of windows and landing on a huge mattress of money labelled ‘U.S. Treasury.’

*****

Times are pretty bleak…but laughter, they say, is the best medicine. Want to add your own laugh-line to the list? Post it in the “comment” section below.

While the credit meltdown has many of the bankers who have been able to hang on to their jobs twiddling their thumbs lately, nothing could be further from the truth for equity capital markets desks at major banks.

Those desks are tasked with moving tens of billions of dollars in equity as struggling financial institutions try to bolster capital. 

Today, Bank of America is trying to raise $10 billion in common stock, part of its plan to offset a sharply slowing economy and deteriorating credit.

Last week, it was Goldman Sachs and General Electric, who between them sold $25 billion in new stock alongside separate capital injections from folsky Nebraskan billionaire Warren Buffett, notes high-profile Oppenheimer analyst Meredith Whitney in a note today.

Still to come? Another $30 billion, this time for Citigroup and Wells Fargo, the two rival combatants for Wachovia.

In fact, the amount financial servies covered by Oppenheimer have raised over the last three weeks is equivalent to nearly 80 percent of what they had raised since the third quarter of 2007, Whitney said.

“With such massive capital raises, we believe a ’sooner is better’ mentality will prevail as far as capital raises and distinguish survivors and the more challenged among banks, Whitney said.

(Adds Cramer’s next day comments)

As global markets were routed amid quantitative signs of investor panic, there were more than a few strange sights on Monday. But perhaps none stranger or more sobering than CNBC’s famously bullish analyst Jim “Mad Money” Cramer interrupting middle America’s morning coffee with a warning to sell its stocks. Right. Now.

“Whatever money you may need for the next five years, please take it out of the stock market right now, this week,” he told The Today Show. You could almost hear the morning coffee spit-takes in kitchens and living rooms across the nation.

Or, as the FT’s Alphaville blog put it: “Capitulation, BOOYAH.”

But perhaps Cramer’s ominous sell recommendation is a contrarian indicator that the tide is soon to turn? Barry Ritzholtz of the Big Picture blog wrote: “DAMN if that headline doesn’t smell like a giant buy signal. The market down 30%, the VIX spiking to 56, and Cramer giving a panicky SELL on TV this morning. … We are putting a toe in the water here.”

Are you? Cast your vote on hubdub:

Will the market fall 20 percent?

On Tuesday Cramer returned to the Today Show to explain his comments, saying he is “an innate optimist” and that “the stock market is a good thing.”

“I’m not so arrogant as to think that I affected (Monday’s) market,” he added. “What happens if there is a fire in the building?”

St. Petersburg Times TV/media critic Eric Deggans had this to say about Cramer’s twin morning show appearances:

Cramer’s squirming today just exemplifies a problem many TV business analysts face every time a big economic bubble bursts. Hobbled by past cheerleading and missed calls, it’s tough to take their reporting seriously as conditions deteriorate; if they couldn’t catch these problems before they became big news — and built big audiences riding the same wave that made millions for their CEO pals — why should anyone trust their analysis now?

All this is made more ironic by the fact that Cramer gave essentially sound advice Monday; people should be taking short-term money out of a plunging stock market, despite the fact that it makes the plunging get worse. But when you’ve been a cheerleader for so long, sometimes it’s tough to step into a new role without surprising a few people.