While we were sitting down to our Sunday night ham with cloves and ample pineapple, executives over at Wachovia Corp., the nation’s fifth-largest bank, were sweating the detail of a capital infusion that could bring it $6 billion to $7 billion – but at a discount to its stock price that’s bound to hurt.

Wachovia Corp., which barreled into adjustable-rate mortgages with the huge acquisition of Golden West Financial Corp. near the peak of the housing market, could announce as soon as Monday that it is getting a capital infusion of several billion dollars from outside investors, according to people familiar with the matter.

Final terms of the deal were being hammered out Sunday night, but it appeared likely the fifth-largest U.S. bank in stock-market value would receive $6 billion to $7 billion. In return, the investor group would get shares priced roughly $23 to $24 apiece -- a 15% discount to Wachovia's share price Friday.

Unlike recent infusions other companies have received, no government investment funds, known as sovereign-wealth funds, are believed to be among the investors pumping capital into Wachovia.

Wachovia's need for capital comes only two months after the Charlotte, N.C., bank raised $3.5 billion through a preferred-stock sale. At the time, G. Kennedy Thompson, Wachovia's chairman and chief executive, told shareholders that those funds "provide greater certainty that we are well positioned in 2008." Wachovia officials repeatedly denied that dividend payments would be reduced in order to conserve cash.

Since then, though, the banking industry's problems have continued to worsen. First-quarter results are expected to show that loan woes are spreading from mortgages to commercial loans and other types of credit. Loan defaults will surge even higher if the economy sinks into a deep recession.

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