Cityfile: New York's Most Notable and Influential

♦  Treasury officials say as many as 1,800 institutions may apply for government investments in the next few weeks. [WSJ]
♦  GM hasn't been so lucky extracting cash: The Treasury has turned down a request by the automaker for $10 billion to help finance a merger with Chrysler. [NYT]
♦  Henry Kravis's KKR is delaying its plan to go public on the NYSE until 2009. [CNNMoney]More

Henry Kravis Gets All Nerdy | Heart congrats to Henry Kravis: The billionaire financier unveiled a new website for his private equity giant today. The site is still missing glossy headshots of Kravis himself (and, sadly, he has not yet followed Carl Icahn's lead and started a blog), although the site does now sport slick Chinese and Japanese versions, a useful reminder of just who's keeping the American economy afloat these days. [Dealbook]

• Lehman CEO Dick Fuld's announcement yesterday about the firm's new strategic direction hasn't changed much, say analysts, and questions about Lehman's ability to weather the storm continue to loom. [NYT, WSJ, FT, NYP]
• How Fuld himself has handled the crisis—and whether he'll continue to run the firm for much longer—is open to debate. "I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole every day," says Fuld. [WSJ, NYT]
• WaMu's shares fell 30% yesterday as skittish investors expressed concern over the bank's new management team. [WSJ]
• Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu has taken a 6% stake in the New York Times Co. [Dealbook]

• The price of oil has dropped after Hurricane Gustav did less damage than initially feared. [CNNMoney]
• Lehman news of the day: Korea Development Bank is, in fact, in talks to buy a stake in the bank. [Bloomberg]
• Some of the biggest hedge funds are having their worst years in history. Among the biggest losers: Atticus Capital, Cantillon, and GLG Partners. [WSJ]
• Taking aim at Microsoft, Google is unveiling a browser of its own called Google Chrome. [NYP] 
• Commerzbank stock has taken a beating following its decision to buy Dresdner Bank for $14.4 billion amid concern by investors that it's overpaying.  [Bloomberg]
• KKR's IPO prospectus "gleefully contrasts itself" from Steve Schwarzman's Blackstone. [WSJ]
  
• Bankruptcy pro Harvey Miller of Weil Gotshal explains why he's going to be busy this fall. [NYP]

• Temasek, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, has "great confidence" in Merrill CEO John Thain. [Bloomberg]
• Henry Kravis's KKR, Hellman & Friedman and Bain Capital are all in the running to acquire Neuberger Berman from an ailing Lehman Brothers. [Dealbook]
  
• Who is financing big real estate deals now that the banks are pulling back? Hedge funds, of course. [WSJ]
• Ricoh will buy Ikon for $1.6 billion. [Reuters]
• Mattel was awarded $100 mil. in a suit over the Bratz line of dolls. [NYP]
• Amazon is buying Shelfari, the social network for book lovers. [NYT]
• David Pecker is hoping a refinancing at AMI will allow him to keep the company under his control. [NYP]
• Some data suggests the U.S. housing market may be edging towards a rebound. [FT]

• Phil Falcone's Harbinger Capital Partners has taken a 4.9 percent stake in Cablevision. [NYP]
• Nelson Peltz and his Trian fund has sold its stake in Starbucks. [Bloomberg]
• Hedge fund Turnberry Capital Management plans to shut down. [Reuters]
• Bill Ackman may hold out for more in CVS Caremark's acquisition of Longs Drugs Stores for $2.54 billion. [Dealbook]
• Merrill Lynch has imposed a hiring freeze through the end of this year. [Bloomberg]
• Yahoo will add the former CEOs of Viacom and Nextel Partners to its board as part of a deal with dissident shareholder Carl Icahn. [NYT]
• New Hampshire securities regulators have accused a division of UBS of fraud. [WSJ]
• KKR and top partners like Henry Kravis and George Roberts collected $1.3 billion in 2007. [The Deal]
• It's been a "cruel summer for Apollo" and Leon Black. [WSJ]

• Merrill CEO John Thain is responding to critics and disputing "notions that he misled investors about his intentions to raise capital." [NYT]
  
• Former Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz is in discussions with a handful of companies about a new job, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Warburg Pincus and KKR. [NYP]
• With an investigation by attorney general Andrew Cuomo underway, UBS's general counsel, David Aufhauser, has resigned. [NYT]
• SocGen posted a 63% decline in second-quarter net profit. [WSJ]
• KKR is having difficulty raising cash for its latest European fund. [Dealbook]
• Sony will acquire the 50 percent it does not control in SonyBMG from Bertelsmann AG. [WSJ]
  
• Last week, Steven Rattner, the head of DLJ Merchant Banking, resigned from the firm. Today the Times reports on the tawdry details behind his departure. [NYT]

Henry Kravis announced this week that his private equity powerhouse, KKR, plans to go public by the end of the year, a move that will probably end up making him substantially richer than he already is. (He was worth $5.5 billion in 2007, according to Forbes.) What does Henry do with his riches? He buys expensive homes for one thing, like the manse in Palm Beach he purchased in 2006 for $50 million (and which didn't even come with an oceanfront view). No, modesty and humility has never Kravis' strong suit. This is, after all, a man who once lived in a house where his chef could pipe the smell of freshly-baked croissants and coffee into the guestrooms to gently wake them up in the morning. (Sure beats that Dream Machine clock-radio you've been using for the past decade!) But Kravis also directs a fair amount of cash to charity with his third wife, Marie-Josee. In 2006, the couple handed out $5.9 million to a long list of art, culture, and educational institutions. The David Saltzman-led Robin Hood Foundation took home $1 million, as did Rockefeller University. The smallest contribution? The $200 the Kravises gave to Project Angel Food, which feeds people homebound by HIV/AIDS.  The full list of donations by the Marie-Josee and Henry R. Kravis Foundation after the jump.More

• Merrill Lynch has announced it will take another write-down of $5.7 billion and raise an additional $8.5 billion in new common stock. The bank has announced more than $45 billion in write-downs over the past year. [NYT]
• Henry Kravis made personal visits to Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup yesterday to drum up support for KKR's upcoming stock offering. [WSJ]
  
• Alcaltel-Lucent's CEO Pat Russo and chairman, Serge Tchuruk, will step down by the end of the year. [NYT]
• Sony's Howard Stringer is in talks to buy the 50 percent stake in SonyBMG that it does not own. [Reuters]
• British Airways and Iberia are in merger talks. [WSJ]
• Mervyn's may file for bankruptcy protection in the next few days. [WSJ]
• A judge has ruled that Delphi can proceed with a suit against a group of investors, led by David Tepper's Appaloosa Management, for bailing out of a deal to invest $2.5 billion in the company. [The Deal via DB]

• Henry Kravis and George Roberts's KKR will become a public company by the end of the year in a complex deal that may ultimately value KKR at $15-20 billion. [Bloomberg]
• The SEC will extend temporary limits on short-selling as well as extend them to include a number of other additional stocks. [WSJ] 
• Hedge funds may post their worst month in five years. [Bloomberg]
  
• Earning were up 12 percent for Verizon during the second quarter. [NYT]
• Lehman does not plan to part with Neuberger Berman after all. [NYP]
• Sirius execs are in a good mood this morning after the FCC approved the Sirius-XM deal late Friday night. [WSJ]
• More bad news about year-end bonuses: Experts expect financial firms will deliver $18 billion less in pay and benefits in 2008, the biggest single-year decline in Wall Street history. [NYT]

• InBev may need to raise its offer for Anheuser-Busch by $7 billion to win over the company's board. [Bloomberg]
• Bank of America will cut 7,500 jobs at its recently-acquired Countrywide. [NYS]
• Yahoo announced a major reorganization. And Carl Icahn officially filed his bid to clean out Yahoo's board of directors. [WSJ, Dealbook]
  
• TPG and KKR are trying to capitalize on the credit crunch by invest in money management firms. [Bloomberg]
• U.S. M&A activity sank 29% in the second quarter. [Reuters]
• Today is Bill Gates' last day as a full-time Microsoft employee. [NYT]