Tuesday morning headlines

Stocks stumbling: A big drop in consumer confidence is not helping. Dow is down about 75 points.

Bonuses soar: Wall Street paid out over $20 billion in 2009, a 17 percent jump from a year earlier when record losses kept down the numbers. (AP)

Home prices edge higher: Among the 20 cities surveyed, L.A. was the biggest November-to-December gainer, at 1 percent. Earlier reports showed a big price spurt in L.A. for December, followed by a sharp drop in January. (AP)

Toyota testimony: U.S. sales chief James Lentz tells House members that the company is "confident that no problems exist with the electronic throttle control system in our vehicles." From the NYT:

Mr. Lentz again apologized for the way Toyota has handled its recall crisis. Toyota earlier released more than 75,000 pages of documents, including 20,000 in Japanese, that the committee had requested. "In recent months, we have not lived up to the high standards our customers and the public have come to expect from Toyota," Mr. Lentz said. "Simply put, it has taken us too long to come to grips with a rare but serious set of safety issues." He went on, "The problem also has been compounded by poor communications both within our company and with regulators and consumers."

Communication problems: Toyota has a fractured management structure in the U.S. with major divisions often operating as fiefdoms that report directly to Japan. That's not great. From the LAT:

The complicated tasks of gathering information about sudden-acceleration reports, analyzing the problems and engineering fixes, as well as reporting the issues to federal safety regulators, were handled by different Toyota subsidiaries, each managed separately in many cases from Japan, former Toyota managers and employees say. And documents released by House investigators show that some of the disjointed subsidiaries of Toyota had an explicit strategy to minimize safety recalls, saving the company hundreds of millions of dollars even while reports of fatal accidents were increasing.

Anthem gets whacked: An inquiry by the CA Insurance Commissioner has turned up more than 700 claims-handling violations (maximum penalty of 10K per violation). The state's investigation covers consumer complaints from 2006 through 2009. (Sacramento Bee)

Bickering over budget: Lawmakers are voting today on a package of Democratic bills to reduce CA's $20 billion deficit by about $5 billion. Republicans are opposed to most of the plan. The Schwarzenegger administration is opposed to some of it. (AP)

Hummer deal nearing collapse: GM was set to sell the division to a privately held Chinese company, but financing problems and regulatory hold-ups are getting in the way. GM has already extended the deadline several times. (NYT)

Magic bid collapsing: Magic Johnson was unable to reach a deal to acquire Johnson Publishing (Ebony and Jet). (Folio)

TCW's vote of confidence: A majority of the institutional investors in two of the firm's bond portfolios have decided to stay put, a big deal given all the uproar over the firing last year of star money manager Jeffrey Gundlach. (LAT)

Gas prices fall a notch: An average gallon of regular in the L.A. area is $2.968, down less than a cent over last week, according to the government's weekly survey.

Lacter on radio: This morning's biz chat with KPCC's Steve Julian looks at the expanding Bradley terminal and the ongoing debate over moving the northern runway at LAX. Also at kpcc.org and on podcast.