At the Nasdaq, Times Square Alliance President Tim Tompkins was scheduled to ring the opening bell, signaling the resumption of business as usual—we hope. The New York Stock Exchange, which hadn't closed for two consecutive days due to weather since 1888, was also set to open.

"Our building and systems were not damaged and our people have been working diligently to ensure that we have a smooth opening," NYSE Euronext CEO Duncan Niederauer said in a statement.

But good intentions are no guarantee of positive results. The Times reported yesterday that the New York Stock Exchange was experiencing "connectivity problems," while the Journal reported criticisms of the exchanges inadequate preparations for extreme events such as severe weather or terrorist attacks.

A few other notes from around Wall Street:

Goldman Sachs Chief Operating Officer Gary Cohn discussed the most critical operations to get up and running with Bloomberg Television yesterday: "Tomorrow is month-end ,and we are heading to the unemployment Friday and then the election is next week," he said. "The clients that really need people in the building are more of the trading clients."

Traders are leaving for work extra early to make sure they're ready for today's open, The New York Times reports.

One market pro is expecting "significant volatility" in today's trading.

AIG CEO Robert Benmosche said the company's costs related to the storm would be along the lines of costs related to Hurricane Irene. “We don’t see it as anywhere near the tsunami,” he said at a conference yesterday according to Bloomberg, referring to the tsunami that blasted Japan last year.

Citigroup's offices at 111 Wall Street will be closed for weeks, according to a memo from CEO Michael Corbat obtained by Bloomberg.

Pimco CEO Mohamed El-Erian writes of Sandy that "after an immediate negative impulse of several weeks, the impact on GDP as a whole will be mixed to slightly positive."

As previously reported, the exchange initially planned to close its physical trading floor and open on electronic systems as Hurricane Sandy battered New York City today. That decision was reversed late last night. Minutes ago, the exchange said it would remain closed tomorrow, along with other U.S. markets:

In consultation with other exchanges and market participants, NYSE Euronext (NYX) will close its markets in coordination with all U.S. equities, bonds, options and derivatives markets on Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012.  This follows the closure of U.S. markets on Monday, Oct. 28, 2012. We intend to re-open our U.S. markets on Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012, conditions permitting; updates will be provided tomorrow.

While Nasdaq has yet to confirm it will remain closed tomorrow, The Observer has heard from one party dissuaded by the wind and rain. Padma Lakshmi and the cast of Top Chef: Seattle were slated to ring Nasdaq's opening bell in Times Square tomorrow. That appearance will be rescheduled, a spokeswoman for the show said.

The New York Stock Exchange had planned to open trading electronically while shuttering its physical trading floor. "We are open for business and at the same time acting in accordance with actions taken by the city and state of New York," said NYSE CEO Duncan L. Niederauer said in a release yesterday afternoon.

But NYSE reversed course  last night, announcing it would halt operations completely. The exchange is closed today, and may close tomorrow, "pending confirmation," according to a release.

Nasdaq is also closed today; "it is likely that the markets will be closed" tomorrow, the exchange said in a release.

Bond markets will open, but the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association recommended that markets close at noon today.

Wall Street firms, meanwhile, have been asking nonessential staff to work from home. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan and American Express are among firms to close buildings in evacuation zone A in downtown Manhattan. From a Citigroup memo published by The Times:

All staff based in Citi facilities within mandatory evacuation zones must invoke their work-from-home strategies for Monday and Tuesday unless they are in business-critical roles that have established alternative work locations. Other Citi facilities outside of mandatory evacuation zones should be accessible for critical personnel only; non-critical personnel should invoke their work-from-home strategies.

First, Nasdaq offered a $40 million compensation pool, with a healthy chunk to paid in credits on future trades.A month later, Nasdaq sweetened the pool to $62 million, with all claims to be paid in cash.

Not good enough for UBS, which said it would “take appropriate legal action against Nasdaq to address its gross mishandling of the offering and its substantial failures to perform its duties,” i.e. the Swiss bank would sue the exchange over every penny of the $356 million it said it lost on the IPO. Not good enough for Citigroup either: "hundreds of millions of dollars of losses suffered by market participants in connection with the Facebook IPO resulted from a series of a series of hasty, self-interested and high-risk business decisions by Nasdaq," it said in a letter of its own.

And so it seemed reasonable to wonder whether Nasdaq would improve its compensation scheme yet again. Not this time, according to Reuters:

Nasdaq OMX Group Inc stood by its proposed $62 million plan to compensate firms affected by the fallout from Facebook's botched initial public offering, taking aim at UBS AG, Citigroup Inc and other parties that derided the payback plan. In a letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission dated September 17, Nasdaq said the proposed compensation pool "goes well beyond what is required under current Nasdaq rules." 

LightSquared, the wireless broadband company backed by Harbinger Capital founder Phil Falcone, is battling with creditors over control of the firm's bankruptcy, according to Bloomberg. LightSquared has asked a judge to extend a deadline to file a Chapter 11 plan; the creditors say, "Having nothing to lose, Mr. Falcone wants to pursue a high-risk, high-return strategy."

Facebook shares may get a bump when the stock is added to the Nasdaq 100, an index of the exchange's non-financial firms. It may not be enough to make up for Nasdaq's botched handling of the Facebook IPO, but every little bit helps...

Commodities giant Glencore upped its offer for Xstrata, the mining company, in hopes of completing a long-anticipated merger. It remains to be seen whether Qatar Holding, the sovereign wealth fund of the Middle Eastern nation, which holds a 12 percent stake in Xstrata, sign off on the new deal. Qatar's hesitance lead Business Insider to wonder if we are seeing the rise of a new kind of activist investor.

The head of the JPMorgan's chief investment office hopes his new gig is a "boring job.

After Dewey & Laboeuf folded, the law firm's softball team lived on.

A predecessor to SunTrust Banks invested in Coca-Cola in 1919, according to Bloomberg. What was worth $100,000 then is worth more than $2 billion now, and the firm is cashing most of the shares to cover bad loans and other costs associated with the financial crisis.

On Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wall Street's courtship of fixed-income investors (now with conference calls!).

Sub-par returns from brand-name private equity firms are dragging on public-employee pension funds.

French President Francoise Hollande is said to be backing down on a proposed 75 percent tax on million-euro wage earners. A revised plan would reportedly lower the top tax rate to 67 percent, and raise the threshold for couples to 2 million euros.

Mutual funds run by Morgan Stanley are showing hefty stakes in Facebook, The Wall Street Journal reports, and while many of those shares were acquired pre-IPO, allowing the funds to show paper gains despite Facebook's fallen stock price, investors in the funds are at risk of further Facebook losses.

HSBC is talking settlement with U.S. regulators over charges the bank violated sanctions against Iran and Sudan among other nations. The bank set aside $700 million for the matter in July.

Bank of America's four new directors are typical bank-director types, Bloomberg reports, perhaps indicating that BofA thinks it's on the right path, definitely indicating that the train has left the station on our dream of shaking up the North Carolina-based bank from inside the boardroom.

Citigroup's private banking unit withdrew $410 million from John Paulson managed hedge funds, a lot of money, no doubt, but as sharper wits than ours have pointed out, so long as Mr. Paulson himself doesn't send a redemption letter to a certain hedge fund located at 1251 Avenue of the Americas, Paulson & Co. should be okay.

SEC Chairman Mary L. Schapiro through down her arms in the effort to rein in systemic risk posed by money-market funds. The Times says the Treasury might take up more powerful weapons.

The case of Vietnamese banker Ly Xuan Hai shows once again that it's safer to be a crooked banker in the west than the east.

A top German politician said that the Greek bailout plan can't be renegotiated. Though history tells us there can't be a renegotiation until in fact there is. Elsewhere, is Finland the forgotten frontier in a potential eurozone breakup?

UBS, which says it lost $356 million due to Nasdaq's technical difficulties, has said it will sue. Citadel, on the other hand, filed a letter with the SEC saying that Nasdaq's proposed remedies are fair.

In the wake of Knight Capital’s $440 million loss due to a rogue trading algorithm earlier this month, two exchange industry executives are talking up a fat finger provision, allowing regulators to roll back the tape and undo trades in exceptional cases.

The Malkins want to form a REIT to take the Empire State Building public. Some crotchety old New Yorkers are holding up the deal. Bloomberg's David M. Levitt goes long.

Angela Merkel and François Hollande are getting ready to play stern parents to Antonis Samaras as the Greek prime minister begins a trip through Berlin and Paris to ask the European powers for more time to reach austerity goals. Tough talk aside, Retuers suggests Europe may have little choice but to give Greece "a bit of air to breathe."

Will Greece leave the euro before it can be kicked out? Does it matter?

Amid the back-and-forth over Peter Thiel’s sale of 72 percent of his Facebook holdings, Bloomberg asks around, and reports such sudden divestiture to be unusual.

Best Buy founder Richard Schulze, who is working on a bid to take the electronics retailer private, and the Best Buy board are negotiating again over whether and under what conditions to allow Mr. Schulze to conduct due diligence on Best Buy's books.

The Fed's Open Market Committee hinted at further easing in meeting minutes released yesterday, and markets rallied.

It doesn't matter how loud you shout about the fiscal cliff (which, the Congressional Budget Office says could lead to a "significant recession" if lawmakers don't act). The news always seems to get buried.

Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Mary L. Schapiro wanted to bring changes to the way money market funds are regulated, forcing the funds to hold cash against dark days, or let the funds fluctuate with the market. It's not going to happen, at least not at the moment.

Whale-slayer Boaz Weinstein is struggling to keep his head above water, reports The New York Post. Mr. Weinstein's Saba Capital iMaster Fund is only up 0.62 percent for the year, even after profiting in trades against the JPMorgan trader known as the London Whale.

Day-trading settlement: The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is expected to enter a settlement today with Swift Trade founder Peter Beck, and The Wall Street Journal as a long and excellent piece on the Hungarian-born entrepreneur's global operations. Mr. Beck founded Swift in 1998 after reading about internet trading on an airplane; By 2008, the network employed about 4,000 traders in places like Romania, China and Nicaragua, where the firm could hire on the cheap. Swift also took an aggressive stance towards the law, failing to create a supervisory structure, creating an atmosphere in which traders reportedly manipulated prices.

Post-whale world: The type of hedge fund that profited on JPMorgan's $5.8 billion trading loss in credit derivatives are looking attractive, Reuters reports, as investors seek less volatile investments. The obvious question (which probably has an obvious answer) is whether the credit funds are more stable, or just found themselves in the right place to take advantage of the trader known as the London Whale.

Whither Europe: Deutsche Bank blamed a 46 percent drop in a second-quarter earnings on the European debt crisis. BBVA said net income fell 58 percent, as Spain's real estate crisis weighed on earnings. Things may be getting worse: the bank will set aside more than 3 billion euros against souring real estate loans in the second half of the year, after provisioning 1.43 billion euros in the first six months. Greece is running out of cash to pay everyday expenses such as police department salaries and pension disbursements. Unemployment in the eurozone rose to 11.2 percent.

Tale of the tiger (cub): As a student at the University of Virginia, John Gerson talked his way into an internship at Julian Robertson's Tiger Management. Then joined John A. Griffin when the former Tiger deputy founded Blue Ridge Capital. Now Mr. Gerson, 37, has raised $1.2 billion to found a fund of his own, Falcon Edge Capital.

Fall guy? As Royal Bank of Scotland negotiates a Libor settlement with authorities investigating the bid-rigging matter, CEO Stephen Hester may be forced to leave his job ahead of plans.

Taking medicine: Nomura Holdings, Japan's biggest brokerage, faces unspecified penalties after regulators recommended that the firm be disciplined after employees participated in insider trading schemes by leaking information about public offerings.

Soccer riches: Manchester United set a range of $16 to $20 a share in updated documents describing its initial public offering; at a midpoint of $18 a share, the offering would value the British soccer club at $2.95 billion.

Market crash: The bottom is falling out of the market for used private jets, according to The New York Post, hitting the one percent in their wallets.

Kohlberg director out: Christopher Lacovara, one of two managing directors at Kohlberg & Co., the private equity firm founded by Jerome Kohlberg, has left the firm to pursue other opportunities. Kohlberg & Co. was founded by Jerome Kohlberg, who also co-founded buyout giant KKR.

Soft tactics: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England talked about reforming the process by which Libor and other interbank lending rates are set, but play their hands timidly in recommending action. Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic are asking why.

Does anyone want this job? It's a lot easier to say who won't replace Bob Diamond as Barclays CEO than to guess who will. Deputy chairman Michael Rake and the firm's investment banking head Rich Ricci each ruled himself out over the weekend.

If at first you don't succeed...apologize again: Nasdaq announced a new plan to compensate customers for losses suffered due to technical glitches during Facebook's May initial public offering. Among the changes: Nasdaq upped the amount it would refund from $40 to $62 million, agreed to pay refunds in cash, as opposed to with credits on future trades and expanded eligibility for the funds. The expanded plan is unlikely to satisfy all investors. Knight Capital has said lost as much as $35 million on the botched IPO, while reports surfaced last month that UBS might float a much higher number.

Whither Europe: The Spanish government is paying more in borrowing costs than it has at any time since the inception of the euro, and finance minister Luis de Guindos is heading to Berlin tomorrow to talk about it.

Jumping in: Marc Lasry, Avenue Capital hedge fund manager and Democratic Party booster, has finished raising a $3 billion fund to invest in European debt. He joins alternate investment firms such as Blackstone, KKR and Apollo Global Management to seek profit in volatile European markets.

Black list: Zero Hedge reads Italian, spots this list of 10 cities that may default.

Chinese GDP...The new Libor? Investors double-check the math.

Future of futures: The National Futures Association is looking to tighten up its ship after Peregrine Financial Group founder Russell R. Wasendorf misappropriated more than $200 million on the NFA's watch.

Smaller entities slide through loopholes: The largest U.S. lenders have created more than 10,000 subsidiaries in the last two decades in an effort to reduce tax and regulatory exposure.

Ackman acolyte out: Scott Ferguson is leaving Pershing Square to start an activist hedge fund of his own, according to letter obtained by Bloomberg. Mr. Ferguson was the first analyst Mr. Ackman hired at Pershing Square.

Niall Ferguson compared the game of chicken playing out between Athens and Greece to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

If the story of Spanish banks sounds familiar, perhaps you remember Ireland?

Moody's downgraded five Dutch banks.

Blame game: Facebook is preparing to file a motion in U.S. District Court that would consolidate all lawsuits arising from the company's disappointing initial public offering, The New York Times reports. The motion, which could be filed as soon as today, is expected to lay some blame on Nasdaq for the lost shareholder value in the days after the IPO.

Quants gain: May was a good month for black-box hedge funds, Reuters reports. The BarclayHedge index of commodity trading advisers, or CTAs, as the funds are sometimes called, gained 2.6 percent last month. The BarclayHedge hedge fund index fell 2.8 percent.

Bank bears: Investors increased their bets that bank stocks would fall by 9 percent in the second half of may against the previous two weeks, the largest increase over a two-week period since 2009. Short interest in Bank of America and Citigroup jumped 75 percent and 61 percent respectively, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Repaid: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said it has been paid in full—$53.12 billion for loans plus interest—the funds used to support government bailouts of AIG and Bear Stearns.

Dalio's world: Want to know your favorite trader's batting average on tech stocks? Baseball cards are in at Bridgewater Associates.

Bank sues Schilling: Citizens Bank is suing to recover $2.4 million in loans made to former Red Sox star Curt Schilling, whose video game company 38 Studios filed Chapter 7 this week.