We’re always looking for news about the political and personal battles waged inside of CNBC’s “global headquarters.” But lately the internal rumor mill has been all too quiet. It’s like everyone took the summer off from hating, undermining and backstabbing!

Just a few days after Labor Day, however, it looks like the long knives are out and backs are getting pricked. “The top talents at CNBC are battling over a billboard,” Page Six reports. “A network insider tells us Maria Bartiromo, Suze Orman and Donny Deutsch ‘all want their pictures on CNBC’s billboard overlooking the West Side Highway, and there’s always a lot of fighting and lobbying behind the scenes over it. They’re like a bunch of prima donnas.’ A CNBC flack denied any rivalry and insisted all three have had their mugs featured on the board in the last year.”

So have Erin Burnett and Becky Quick just given up? Why aren’t they on the billboard? And what about those two who have somehow captured “The Call” this morning, Rebeca Jarvis and Trish Regan? What did they have to do to Margaret Brennan to keep her off the air?

Face Race [New York Post]

It seems that our obsession with Erin Burnett may not be accidental. According to her big New York Times profile, by none other than the highly influential Brian Stelter, Burnett’s rise to celebrity was carefully engineered by CNBC.

Erin nicely handles the question that is asked of any successful, beautiful woman: what role did her looks play in her success? This is especially relevant at CNBC, where many of their viewers are known to watch with the volume turned all the way down until important news breaks. “There is an element of TV that is visual. You can’t deny that,” she tells Stelter. “But you’re not going to be able to move to the next level without the passion, the contacts, the journalistic drive.”

And man does she have drive. Erin (notice how well programmed we are by CNBC that we feel comfortable calling her by her first name) started out at Goldman Sachs but immediately began gunning for television business news stardom. She wrote to Willow Bay, the co-anchor CNN’s “Moneyline” and landed herself the job of Bay’s assistant and then as a writer at the network. Later, she somehow turned a job writing a business plan for an internet media start-up at Citigroup into an on air job. (It seemed she pulled a Dick Cheney and chose herself for the role.) This caught Bloomberg TV’s attention, which got her noticed by CNBC.

One thing that the article doesn’t explore is Erin’s fascination with China, which she continued this morning on Squawk On The Street by announcing that she’s far more interested in seeing Mongol than Dark Knight. (By the way, this might be the official contrarian line of the week. Two hedge fund managers said exactly the same thing to us this weekend.)

Needing a Star, CNBC Made One [New York Times]

Last week we pointed out a feature in Marie Claire magazine in which CNBC anchor Becky Quick posed as a “Fashion Expert” telling a twenty-something bond trading girl how to dress for Wall Street.

We couldn’t help but notice that it seems Becky offers a veiled insult at one of her fellow CNBC anchors when she says: “Don’t [wear] bright colors, you’ll stand out at the stock exchange and not in a good way.”

After the jump, check out who at CNBC stands out in that way.

If you haven’t read all the way through the latest issue of Marie Claire yet, you’ll want to slip directly to page 139. That’s where CNBC anchor Becky Quick gives fashion advice to a twenty-seven year old Bank of America assistant bond trader Lucia Knight.

“Wall Street may be 95 percent men, but don’t dress like one,” Quick says. “But don’t dress like a girly-girl either.”

She also says she occasionally looked fat and garish in her early appearances on CNBC, and then immediately brags about being “petite.” More after the jump.

Squawk Box host Joe Kernen this morning compared CNBC on-air editor Charlie Gasparino to Stuart Shugarman, the Wall Street hedge fund manager who alleged he was assaulted during a spin class for grunting too loudly.

In an informal segment of the show referred to as “seats” (because the three hosts sit in directors chairs and talk about more light-hearted fare than the usual market chatter), Kernen said that he was glad that the accused Christopher Carter, a stockbroker, was acquitted by a jury yesterday. Kernen described people who grunt loudly in the gym as people who “you can’t stand.” Then he turned his fire on Gasparino.

“You know Gasparino grunts in the gym,” Kernen said. “He’s a grunter.”

Kernen quickly added that he’s unlikely to attempt to throw Gasparino around the gym the way Carter allegedly threw Sugarman.

“You going to go tell Charlie to stop?” Kernen asked co-hosts Becky Quick and Carl Quintanilla. “Then I’d have the herniated disc.”

Charlie Gasparino could not be reached for comment. Probably because we didn’t want to call him at 6:30 in the morning.

It’s no secret that CNBC sweetie Erin Burnett like taking trips to “exotic locales.” This time around her trip is in India, where cricket is simply huge. So huge, in fact, that sporty Erin couldn’t resist getting suited up and taking a few whacks at the ball herself.

She’s also doing things like going to banks and the stock exchange. But for some reason, we find ourselves much more interested in the cricket segment than any of the “serious” stuff.

Cricket in India [CNBC]

Lehman Brothers led the pack of financial stocks downward this morning, falling to six-year low as investors speculated that the firm might be vulnerable to a run-on-the bank similar to the one that brought down Bear Stearns. This worry continues despite Lehman having announced a new 3-year credit facility of $2 billion dollars and the Federal Reserve opening up the discount window to brokerages houses, a move many regard as specifically aimed at providing liquidity to avoid the fears that fueled the collapse of Bear.

But the pressure on Lehman’s stock continues. Lehman is leveraged more heavily than its Wall Street peers and it is a major player in the mortgage market, the source of much of the pain for Bear Stearns. It recently completed a round of 10% across-the-board layoffs, a move intended to show capital markets that the bank is serious about improving efficiency and cutting costs.

Lehman has yet to report any truly bad news . Its write-offs on the last two quarters of 2007 added up to about $1.6 billion, far below the write-off numbers of some of its peers. But this has ironically fueled market fears—many wonder if Lehman has more exposure than it has let on. Lehman chief executive Dick Fuld has attempted to reassure investors and employees. But the Wall Street Journal’s headline—Lehman Says Liquidity Is Fine—only served to remind investors of similar assurances from Bear last week.

More after the jump.

It was a bit disconcerting to hear President George Bush discuss the resiliency of the economy while ten blocks away people were scrambling to figure out whether Bear Stearns is going to be dissolved. We half-wished Bush would actually switch the location of his speech to a Bear Stearns trading floor just so we could see what kind of reception he’d get there.

That didn’t happen. But tonight CNBC is bringing us the next best thing: the President was interviewed by former Bear Stearns managing director Larry Kudlow. It airs tonight at at 7 PM ET on CNBC’s “Kudlow & Company.” We’re hoping it will be like an episode of Law & Order: SVU, with Goldilocks as the “special victim.”

Speaking of cute girls, Erin Burnett, the CNBC Street Sweetie who interviewed Jon Corzine on Street Signs this afternoon, might have born and raised in a small town on the eastern shore of Maryland, but she attended the tony boarding school St. Andrew’s School in Middletown, Delaware. She graduated in 1994, when he high school yearbook famously predicted that in 20 years she would become a talkshow host.

Click here to download the pdf of The Griffin, her highschool year book.

Can’t get enough of the Eliot Spitzer saga? Tonight at 8 PM (and rebroadcast at 11 PM ET) CNBC is presenting a special titled “The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer: A CNBC Special,” anchored by Dylan Ratigan.

The one-hour special examines, among other topics, the effect Spitzer had on Wall Street. It will feature a huge gang from CNBC, including anchors and reporters Charlie Gasparino (Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, Scott Cohn, Melissa Lee, Hampton Pearson, among others.

Dylan Ratigan will anchor live from Wall Street. We told CNBC they weren’t allowed to have Melissa Francis, Erin Burnett, Becky Quick, Trish Regan or Maggie Brennan for the special. We’re planning on getting them drunk at our happy hour.*

*No CNBC women were harmed, or even spoken to, in the creation of this post.

CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo has sold a book about ‘sucess’ for an advance several knowledgable sources said was approximately $500,000, according to Leon Neyfakh of the New York Observer.

This would be Maria’s second book. Her first, Use the News: How to Separate the Noise from the Investment Nuggets and Make Money in Any Economy, came out in 2002. Earlier this year, her CNBC colleague Charlie Gasparino published King of the Club, a book detailing the rise and fall of former New York Stock Exchange head Dick Grasso.

‘Money Honey’ Indeed! [Observer.com]

We’ve just received word, from the same tipster who brought us the joyous news that someone with a head on his shoulders over at the NYMEX changed the channel from Mark Haines’s rack to Jenna Lee’s, that: “CNBC is back today on the nymex, looks like gasparino read your article and broke some kneecaps to get cnbc back on down here.”

Earlier: Fantastic News

Hat tip: Barry Ritholtz.

I never took Charles Gasparino for a scheming, vindictive, even terribly inventive man. That all changed when I found myself curled up on the bathroom floor circa 2 am this morning. But let me start from the beginning. As most of you who read this site with any regularity know, we’re obsessed with chronicling the eating, iron-pumping and fiber-expelling habits of CNBC reporter Charlie Gasparino. Since he clearly has a Google alert set up for himself, he’s well-aware of the enthusiasm with which we cover his professional and personal life. I don’t want to say that we were told by several well-placed sources that Chuck liked all this attention we were lavishing on him, so I’ll say this— we were told by several well-placed sources that Chuck LOVED all this attention we were lavishing on him. Is “went to his head” the correct turn of phrase to use in this situation? I’m not sure, but nothing else comes to mind, and it’s a pretty fair assessment of what began to happen.

And that was okay. Annoying, but okay. We’d created this belle of the ball in Gasparino, and we were willing to take all the credit (/Pulitzer nominations) and criticism that came with the coverage, in addition to your standard starlet behavior. We were fine with the fact that we would get calls complaining about running certain photos that made a certain someone “look bloated,” and that beginning last month, not a day would go by when Charlie wouldn’t contact us to say “It’s 7 am, I’ve already worked out, showered and had breakfast, why haven’t you written about me yet?” to which we replied, “Well, Charles, when you work out with the sleeves cut off, and not in this hoity toity Under Armor shit, as our moles at Gold’s Gym where you whaled on your pecs today tell us you did, that’s when we’ll write about you,” to which he would inevitably respond, “I’ve already taken out my clippers, and scheduled additional reps on the Bow-Flex for noon. Write the post now so it’s ready to go at 12.” We would write the post and it would be good and this parasitic-yet-beneficial relationship would continue.

Lately, though, meaning like last week, Charlie was becoming obsessive. Emailing us at three, and four, and five a.m. to make sure we’d received the photos of him leaving the studio “drinking a delicious Myoplex shake (out of one of those plastic gallon containers, of course),” so he could get his free monthly shipment of powders and bars, the “building blocks of any fitness plan worth its salt.” Asking if we’d noticed how much more “cut” he looked on-air compared to Kernan. Not shutting the fuck up about how braciole isn’t something he requests during bathroom time (“It’s thinly sliced pieces of mortadella while I’m on the can or it’s nothing at all!”).

And we’re not easily rattle-able people, but it was starting to piss us off. So we didn’t exactly put our all into our regularly scheduled “Where in the world is Charlie Gasparino” feature on Friday, just to give him a taste of what life would be like for him if we started half-assing it. And he didn’t like that one bit. Told a friend he was ticked that we didn’t mention the throbbing veins in his forearms. The rippling pectorals as ripe as two grapefruits out of the alluringly yet tastefully vivisected Champion sweatshirt. The way the children in the gym’s play room cowered when he howled ‘Ba fungool!’ after every bench rep. The musky, pheromone-concentrated odor he emits when working out that draw women the way chum lures sharks. Said he was going to make us “pay” for this egregious offense, which I took to mean he wouldn’t make sure we got comped at Sarge’s on 27th and 3rd next time we got sandwiches.

So when the shipment of soppresata arrived at the office, we thought for a second that it might be some sort of threat, but only in the sense that “something’s coming,” and not that “this actual piece of meat has been poisoned.” Oh, but the ever-conniving No Sleeves knew he didn’t even have to actually tamper with the meat, knowing full-well that the typical Jew, famed for a delicate digestive tract, wouldn’t be able to handle the saltiness and nitrates. (We’ve heard from well-placed sources that he picked up this little trick from Grasso, who sent capicola to Spitzer and all the Jews with NYSE board seats, as chronicled in his latest book, “King of the Club”.)

Which would explain why, at 2 am this morning, after having only sampled a tiny piece of the soppresata earlier in the evening, we were rudely awoken with a thirst so great we were forced to chug the month-old, half empty bottle of peach Snapple next to our bed, before projectile vomiting the offensive toxin from our mouths (ending our five month no-puking streak), and subsequently spent the next several hours on the cold tile floor. And we didn’t like the ending of our no-vomit streak one bit.

So. In keeping with the time-honored tradition of the Jewish and Italian mafias battling over Wall Street supremacy (as chronicled in Charlie’s book “King of the Club,” available on Amazon and wherever books are sold), Levin will now demonstrate to No Sleeves once and for all that despite the fictional comeuppances of Shylock and Hyman Roth by guineas, the Jews wrote the book on revenge.

The question is how. I leave the answer to you. (Write-ins by Chosen People given extra weight.)

The Post reported today that in order to compete with the mistresses of Fox Business, CNBC has brought in a new wardrobe stylist to skank things up a bit (previous credits include Backdoor Sluts 7,8 and 9). As the story goes, staid crew necks have been swapped for “form-fitting V-necks” and pants for no pants. While we are all for this new regime, there are a couple things with which we take issue. First, it’s not the Fox anchors that are of the looser persuasion, it’s their guests. So if CNBC were trying to go tit-for-tat (oh yeah, I went there), it would be unbuttoning John Carney’s top buttons, not Maria Bartiromo’s.

Second, if anyone was watching CNBC today, they would’ve seen that Erin Burnett was dressed in, not a plunging neckline sweater but say it together, a crew-neck, underneath a hideously boxy beige blazer. (Not that I give a baker’s fuck, or that it matters, since I think EB always looks good*, I’m just trying to make a point.) Which actually makes me wonder whether or not CNBC caught wind of the item and was like, “You wanna try and expose us as newly minted tramps? Fuck you, we’ll be the exact opposite.” And I don’t like that at all. Tomorrow, I want to see a shot of Haines’s cock ring. The rest of you, I want to see those stripper spangles through white blouses (you, too, Pisani). We can get back to peddling ass, if we try.

V-neck Defense [NYP]

*That was me channeling Don Klarney, tell me what you thought.

Apparently the money honey is like the anti-EF Hutton. When she speaks, people space out.

As he passed through Grand Central Terminal last month, Dr. David Berman, a commuter from Westport, Conn., usually perked up when he heard the voice of Maria Bartiromo, the CNBC anchor, echoing through the main hall over the public announcement system.

“Her voice resonates so nicely,” Dr. Berman recalled last week as he polished off a coffee in the terminal’s food court. Pressed to recall what she had to say, however, he came up blank: “Is it — let’s see — something to do with not leaving packages behind?” He heard her name and CNBC, but by the time the message rolled around, he had “moved on to something else,” he said.

Safety Messages That Sound Like Silence [New York Times]

Listening to this clip. Specifically from around 5’30. My one complaint is that Gasparino doesn’t punctuate “deleveraging is a bitch” with ‘la putta!’ or something, but that’s a minor gripe in a meat locker full of Soppresata.

This week may be the first real test for the Fox Business Network, TV Decoder’s Brian Stelter points out today. Market turmoil tends to drive up viewership for television business news, and FBN is running hard to catch the wave of attention directed at the rocky markets.

While CNBC was basically shut down yesterday, FBN carried the news of yesterday’s global meltdown live. CNBC, however, is responding with a two hour “Market Survival Guide” special that will air tonight from 7-9 PM. Because, see, CNBC is quick and nimble—like the Fed.

CNBC pulled out all the stops this morning, throwing Cramer on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to echo the sentiment of some traders that the Fed should cut another 50 basis points. Charlie Gasparino got a little rough, declaring that “deleveraging is a bitch.”

We asked Bess what Fox did this morning and she replied, “I didn’t go to Burger King.”

Stocks Down, Interest In Business News Up [TVDecoder]

To judge from the comments and our email, many of our readers think we’ve lost our minds on Merrill Lynch. We were impressed by the performance of Thain and Co. on this morning’s earnings call and wrote a good deal about it early this morning. We thought it was a strong performance but readers point out that shares of Merrill have been plummeting all day long. They say this indicates that the market doesn’t buy our evaluation of the earnings call. We’re not so sure. It may have been far worse if Thain and his guys had come off as badly at Vikram Pandit’s guys did on Tuesday.

We aren’t yet at the point where we’re going to be swallowing Thain’s kool-aid but our attention to his words might have led us to overlook something in his interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo. This afternoon Street Insider points out that the interview took place on the fixed income trading floor. Why do it there? Well, perhaps to prove that people are still trading fixed income—or that the place has totally been totally cleaned up since that unspeakable incident we wouldn’t stop talking about earlier this week and last week. (Update: They were on the seventh floor, twelve floors below the scene of last week’s crime.)

But this might not have had the desired effect. The traders on the fixed income floor seemed oddly unoccupied, gathering in the background and looking at their boss—or perhaps themselves—on television monitors. This has people wondering why these folks weren’t busy engaging in actual trading.

“Traders usually do not have time to do many other things, than trade, but this morning this small group of traders were more concerned with their tv appearance than making money for Merrill Lynch,” Street Insider says. “I don’t know if this should tell you something about how John Thain runs Merrill, or if this was just a few traders that had a slight lapse in judgment, in what has been very tough days for Merrill Lynch workers in recent weeks.”

Merrill Lynch Traders Do Not Appear Too Busy [Street Insider]

Last night CNBC held a little party for the one year anniversary of “Fast Money.” I wouldn’t call it the “best” party for a cable show about finance I’ve ever been to (that would be Mark Haines’s last soiree. Theme: nude congo line), but it wasn’t the “worst” party for a cable show about finance I’ve ever been to (that would be Cody Willard’s short-lived telephone hotline singles ‘party line’). I would peg it as a “very good” party (for a cable show about finance).

Sadly, we arrived too late for Maria Bartiromo, who jetted off after the first 20 minutes, but had ample time to check out Melissa Francis in her black leather boots. Charlie Gasparino was there, and he spent a good part of the night complaining about the lack of (his words/pronunciation) “GABA-GOUL” (he was also heard telling a slight young man that when you’re walking through the East Village at night, you have to show “No fear, NO FEAR,” or risk being mugged). Dylan Ratigan made an unsolicited but much appreciated promise to us that he’d buy Charles a Champion sweatshirt, take the time to cut off the sleeves, and make the boy from Rego Park wear it the next time he’s on the show. In the event that Ratigan comes through, I will definitely start watching Fast Money.

The single greatest part of the evening was the genius dessert gimmick. In the center of every “Fast Money” cupcake was a rolled up five dollar bill (wrapped in plastic). Watching guests lunge for every mini cake they could get their hands on no matter the obstacle (physical or conversational: Melissa Francis nearly got trampled by two asset managers, and Ron Blarney got cut off talking about proxy access by at least four different people), you’d think there were, I don’t know, tens in them. Obviously, DealBreaker was not above this sort of animal behavior, which you can see after the jump. The pics were taken on a camera phone and are a bit grainy and classless, but so is shoving money in dessert food and making your guests fight for it, without the promise of at least one cupcake having a 100.