The paper notes that Cablevision would face fewer regulatory hurdles than would Murdoch or the other bidder, New York Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman, who equaled the $580 million Rupe bid on Friday. But the WSJ says it might face problems with the company’s own shareholders.

The Journal says it isn’t clear whether Cablevision was proceeding with New York Observer owner Jared Kushner in a joint offer, but Newsday and the NYT say it is not.

The Times says the company “may be working with a partner” but its sources wouldn’t identify who it might be.

Thanks, but no thanks

The Los Angeles Times says a lot of banks and investors are willing to cut the terms and payments for borrowers under water on their mortgages, but our Quote of the Day shows how bad the housing bust really is—prices have fallen so far and people are in so much trouble that they just don’t care:

“We are working with borrowers to keep them in their homes, but a lot of them really don’t want to stay,” said Babette Heimbuch, chairwoman of FirstFed Financial Corp. of Los Angeles, a savings and loan operator that specialized in adjustable-rate mortgages, including many that were made without full documentation of borrowers’ incomes.

FirstFed says up to half of delinquent homeowners don’t even respond to requests to work out their notes.

Investors… are buying loans on the cheap from lenders who want them off their books. By paying less than face value for the mortgages, the new holders can modify loan terms, including shrinking the amount owed, and still make money.

With some economists projecting 2 million foreclosures this year, legislators and regulators are hoping to encourage wide use of this model. They want lenders and investors in mortgage bonds to mark down what borrowers owe and then provide them with lower-cost loans.

Calpers beware

The Journal on C1 looks at a blown land deal by Calpers, the California pension fund, which invested a billion dollars in property and now may lose “much of its investment.” The paper notes that the deal is going bad just as two Calpers execs are jumping ship, but says the moves “don’t appear to be related.”

The venture is structured similar to dozens of deals that were popular ways for builders like Lennar to buy highly leveraged land during the boom years and reduce the risk of owning the land outright. They would buy the land with partners in off-balance-sheet entities that would borrow money while limiting the builders’ exposure to the debt. Many of these deals are unraveling.

KKR goes green, sort of

The NYT puts on C1 a PR feed that KKR is partnering with the Environmental Defense Fund to go green. It’s notable because the company owns businesses with $185 billion in revenues and more than 800,000 employees. One of the notable businesses that could use greening is TXU, the big Texas utility company that KKR agreed to buy and reduce its carbon emissions.

The story seems overplayed to us, as the Times says the deal is “aimed at creating measurement tools of environmental performance across several areas.” The Journal has better news judgment, putting it at the bottom of a C3 story (to be fair, it also looks to be a PR exclusive) on a big venture capital fund raising half a billion bucks to target “larger clean-technology companies that need bigger sums of money to get to market.”

Preying on the elderly

The Houston Chronicle reports that the Texas securities commission has received more than 200 complaints from investors who said they were misled into investing into the now-frozen auction-rate securities markets, which they were told were similar to cash.

While some investors are wealthy… many are elderly people whose retirement funds are now frozen in auction rate securities.

“That’s the sad thing. They’re not wealthy people,” attorney Dana Kirk of Houston said. “It was their nest egg kind of money.”

Banks and the rest of the financial industry are going to have big-time problems with lawsuits over the next couple of years, and that’s something about which we haven’t seen enough reporting.

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