Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang will step down as soon as the company finds a replacement, the Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, Business Week, and the New York Times all report this morning. The central narrative of Yang's "rocky reign" in his second stint as CEO was "his refusal to sell the Internet company to Microsoft Corp. for $47.5 billion—more than triple Yahoo's current market value," observes CNN Money. No prizes then for guessing what might be Yahoo's new strategy for escaping the torpor that has gripped the company for more than a year now. "This clears the path for a likely Microsoft deal," Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggarwal tells Business Week. The news was first broken by the WSJ's Boomtown blog, which wastes no time in assessing possible pretenders to the Yahoo crown. Odds on favorite? Current News Corp. President and COO Peter Chernin. One former Internet CEO not being tipped but nevertheless in the news is Mark Cuban. The Dallas Mavericks owner has been charged with insider trading in relation to the sale of 600,000 shares of Internet search company Mamma.com back in 2004. He plans to fight the case.

Yang's imminent departure overshadowed the mind-boggling announcement from Citigroup that it intends "to axe 52,000 jobs, or one in seven employees, and slash costs by about $10bn," as the Financial Times reported. The cull of nearly 14 percent of Citi's global work force represents "one the largest single rounds of layoffs on record, not just for the financial industry but for any industry," notes the NYT. You'd assume Citi's fortunes would make any company think twice about entering the banking sector, but U.S. life insurers are in fact racing to buy tiny banks, reports the WSJ. The reason? "Turn themselves into savings-and-loan holding companies, and thus qualify for infusions from the government under the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program." Their rationale becomes clear when you hear that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has no intention of using "what remains of the $700 billion Wall Street rescue fund to launch substantial new programs" ... say, for the insurance industry.

The NYT looks ahead to the arduous lobbying road trip facing the Big Three auto makers as they head to Washington in search of a bailout. With many politicians opposed to supporting the car companies and Detroit being treated as a dirty word, the NYT looks at how both the companies and the auto unions lost their clout. It asks: "How did the famous 1953 quotation from the former General Motors President Charles E. Wilson—that what was good for our country was good for G.M., and vice versa—become a dated notion to so many people?" Perhaps new data from Ford tallying just how many people around the nation will lose their jobs if it goes under might sway opinion. The analysis, obtained by the WSJ, shows that "25 states could lose 3,000 Ford-related jobs or more if the auto maker were to disappear." Things are so bad for Ford that it will cut its stake in Mazda to 13 percent from 33.4 percent in a move that would "provide Ford some desperately needed cash," CNN Money reports via AP.

Somali pirates, not content with snatching a ship full of tanks, have gone and hijacked a Saudi Arabian supertanker, the BBC reports. The Sirius Star, "the biggest tanker ever to be hijacked," has a cargo of 2 million barrels, a quarter of Saudi Arabia's daily output, worth more than $100 million. Up until now, piracy was low on the list of oil traders' concerns when factoring in the future price of crude. But "as much as half of the world's daily crude consumption is transported to market aboard ships," the WSJ writes. With the oil industry relying "heavily on shipping lanes through the Gulf of Aden, which lies between Yemen and Somalia," pirates now have the power to move oil markets. (The price of crude oil jumped $3 a barrel on the news yesterday before declining again.) The long-term concern is whether attacks could "force a rise in insurance costs for shipping companies," notes the NYT.

Finally, sticking with the shipping news, the Guardian reports that the global recession is hitting the luxury yacht market pretty hard. That means bargains are to be had: Consider the 164-foot Alibella, "which boasts a helipad and marble fixtures and fittings finished with gold trim," and is now available for just $30 million, an $11.9 million reduction off the sticker price.