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The Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal report that Wall Street giants Citigroup and Goldman Sachs have been issued the swine flu vaccine for their "at risk" employees despite the fact that there are massive shortages of the vaccine nationwide. The rarity of the vaccine has made it a hot commodity, one in which movers, shakers, traders, and bailout recipients now have jumped to the front of the line when it comes to what President Obama declared to be a National Emergency in late October. Reaction to the news has been swift, fierce, and angry. Senator Chris Dodd of...

John Reed, who originally helped merge Traveller's Group with Citibank with Sandy Weill, is performing a mea culpa for creating megazombie Citigroup (C): Bloomberg: “I’m sorry,” Reed, 70, said in an interview yesterday. “These are people I love and care about. You could imagine emotionally it’s not easy to see what’s happened." “I would compartmentalize the industry for the same reason you compartmentalize ships,” Reed said in the interview in his office on Park Avenue in New York. “If you have a leak, the leak doesn’t spread and sink the whole vessel. So generally speaking you’d have consumer banking separate...

Citigroup has advised NLPC that Senior Vice President Eric Eve has resigned for ACORN’s Advisory Committee. In a September 28 letter to Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, I asked that the bank sever its relationship with ACORN, including Eve’s membership on the Committee. In an October 29 reply, Citigroup also stated that it has “suspended our charitable financial support and program relationship with ACORN, and we are awaiting the results of the independent audit of ACORN activities now underway.”This is ominous, and certainly leaves open the possibility of continued Citigroup support for ACORN. The “independent audit” is no such thing. It...

Pay Czar Feinberg, Not Obama, Behind Decision to Slash Executive Pay White House pay czar Kenneth Feinberg did not seek President Obama's approval to order steep pay cuts from bailed-out executives. Thursday, October 22, 2009 White House pay czar Kenneth Feinberg was the driving force behind the move to order steep pay cuts from bailed-out executives, and did not even seek the president's approval before making his decision. The Treasury Department is expected to formally announce in the next few days a plan to slash annual salaries by about 90 percent from last year for the 25 highest-paid executives at...

<p>WASHINGTON -- Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has kept in frequent contact with a small group of Wall Street firms since taking the helm at the Treasury, speaking most often with top officials from Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.</p>

Taxpayer-Owned Citigroup Still Bankrolling ACORN Submitted by Peter Flaherty on Sun, 09/27/2009 - 18:59   Now that taxpayers are Citigroup’s biggest shareholder, owning 36% of common stock, it is time for the company and its foundation to end its relationship with ACORN and its affiliates.Citigroup has received $45 billion in taxpayer TARP funds. In addition, taxpayers are on the hook for the lion’s share of losses on the company’s $335 billion loan portfolio.According to the 2008 annual tax return of the Citi Foundation, it provided the ACORN Institute, Inc. with grants of $500,000 for each of the years 2006, 2007...

Many of the fake documents used by a leading Democratic Party fund-raiser to defraud HSBC and Citigroup Inc were made by his brother-in-law, U.S. prosecutors said on Friday. Authorities arrested and charged Shahin Kashanchi, brother-in-law of indicted fund-raiser Hassan Nemazee, who donated to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other leading Democrats over the years. Nemazee pleaded not guilty on Wednesday in Manhattan federal court to defrauding a total of three banks -- Bank of America was the other -- out of $292 million in loan proceeds. "Based on e-mail traffic between Kashanchi and Nemazee, Kashanchi was...

Corporations that have given ACORN millions of dollars over the years are now cancelling their donations in the wake of videotape revelations of employees of the infamous community organizing giving advice on mortgage fraud, tax evasion, prostitution, and child sex slavery. Bank of America is reviewing its grant program, while Citigroup is waiting for the results of on-going investigations. JP Morgan Chase had previously ended its relationship with ACORN. Bank of America donated 28 grants totaling almost $3 million to ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC), since 2005, financial records show. A company spokesman said the activity exposed on videotape prompted the...

HANK Paulson has admitted that he kept in touch with "market participants" on Wall Street when he was Treasury secretary. But did the former head of Goldman Sachs use his government position to enrich his friends during one of the most tumultuous times in US financial history? Paulson's phone logs, which I obtained after a Freedom of Information Act request, show that the Treasury chief kept in frequent touch with a virtual Who's Who of Wall Street's power players. But a half-hour block of time could prove to be the most intriguing bit of non-information in his schedule. Let me...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A fund-raiser for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other Democrats who was charged last month with defrauding Citigroup Inc is being sued by HSBC for deceiving it into lending him $100 million. The lawsuit filed in New York State Supreme Court in early September accused private equity firm head Hassan Nemazee, 59, of engaging in an elaborate scheme to make HSBC Bank USA believe that its loan was secured by collateral in the form of U.S. Treasury Notes when it was not.

UPDATED: ACORN, calling the actions of some of its employees "indefensible," has suspended advising new clients as part of its service programs and is setting up an independent review to see what happened.

As of a few moments ago Bloomberg broke a story suggesting that the US government would be selling off its stake in Citigroup stock. As much as I'm for the US Government and Taxpayer getting away from any of our illegitimate TARP children, Bloomberg's story is just off. here is no such thing as a profit on the sale of this stock when, as a nation, we are into Citi Bank for much more than what was placed into Citi Stock. Specifically, from Bloomberg's article and confirmed via Pro Publica there will be at least $25 billion in warrants left...

No posts from Bloomberg allowed. Link below

The head of the committee overseeing how Uncle Sam is spending its bailout dollars offered withering criticism of the feds' handling of Citigroup's rescue, blasting regulators for their lack of transparency -- and the absence of any clear exit strategy. Noting that other companies that have received federal aid have served up proposals to pay back the money, Elizabeth Warren, chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel, had harsh words about the lack of such a plan in the case of Citi, which has received $45 billion in rescue cash and is more than one-third owned by US taxpayers. "Too big...

Alexander Lewis, who has been at Citigroup since 1999 and before that worked at the Federal Reserve, will head to the Treasury "to work on domestic financial issues," said the Citigroup memo, which was sent Tuesday. -WSJ I suppose it is a step up for his career, but I am not so certain it is a step up for America. Citigroup’s chief economist Lewis Alexander just got a new dream job at the Treasury Department. And wow, he also once worked for the Federal Reserve – impressive! He is a professional con-man. Again, the administration is blatantly recycling old crooks...

NEW YORK CITY (BNO NEWS) -- Hassan Nemazee, CEO of Nemazee Capital and former Finance Chairman to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, was arrested and charged with bank fraud on Tuesday, prosecutors said. According to officials, Nemazee engaged in a fraudulent scheme to induce Citibank to lend him up to $74 million based on false representations that he owned millions of dollars in collateral. Nemazee submitted numerous documents that purported to establish the existence of accounts in his name at various financial institutions containing many hundreds of millions of dollars. In fact, those were fraudulent and forged documents, according to the...

NEW YORK, Aug 25 (Reuters) - The U.S. attorney in New York on Tuesday charged a New York investor and major Democratic fund-raiser with a $74 million scheme to defraud Citigroup Inc (C.N). Hassan Nemazee, 59, was charged with one count of bank fraud, and faces up to 30 years in prison plus a fine. His lawyer Marc Mukasey, a former federal prosecutor, did not immediately return a call seeking comment. Nemazee was a national finance chair of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, and a supporter of John Kerry's run for the White House in 2004....

Name That Party: Alleged Fraudster Was Finance Chair for Hillary Clinton, John Kerry By Ken Shepherd Created 2009-08-25 13:53 Gabriel Malor at Ace of Spades HQ has a great "name that party" catch today [1]. Malor noted that at least three major news outlets all failed to note the high-powered Democratic Party ties of one Hassan Nemazee, a businessman arrested this morning on a charge of bank fraud against Citigroup: Do you know what's not in the CNN article [2]?* Or this Reuters one [3]? Or this AP one [4]? A crucial detail from Nemazee's bio: [5] National Finance Chair...

The bankruptcy of Colonial Bank (CNB) was the largest bank-bankruptcy in the U.S. since several large, U.S. financial institutions collapsed last year – with the most recent being Washington Mutual, last fall. However, there is one huge difference between the mega-bankruptcies of last year and the collapse of Colonial Bank a week ago. During the large bank-failures of 2008, the acquiring institutions wrote-down the “assets” on the books of these banks by an average of 18% - according to a Bloomberg article. However, when BB&T Corp purchased Colonial, it immediately wrote-down Colonial's assets by 37%, double the amount of discounting...

In a few weeks, the Treasury Department's czar of executive pay will have to answer this $100 million question: Should Andrew J. Hall get his bonus? Mr. Hall, the 58-year-old head of Phibro, a small commodities trading firm in Westport, Conn., is due for a nine-figure payday, his cut of profits from a characteristically aggressive year of bets in the oil market. There is little doubt that Mr. Hall is owed the money under his contract. The problem is that his contract is with Citigroup, which was saved with roughly $45 billion in taxpayer aid.

The hefty 2009 pay package of Andrew J. Hall, leader of Citigroup Inc.'s lucrative Phibro energy trading unit, may spark a showdown between the New York-based bank and government pay czar Kenneth Feinberg.

In a pilot program, the charitable arm of Citigroup is giving the National Council of La Raza money to help buy foreclosed homes in Phoenix for rehabilitation and ultimate purchase by low-and moderate-income Latino families. In all, New York-based Citi Foundation is providing $1.75 million to the NCLR, of which $235,000 will go to its Raza Development Fund. That'll allow the fund to acquire, maintain and rehab properties to sell or lease. Raza Development Fund chief Tom Espinoza says the fund will add about $4 million and federal stimulus program money will boost the total to about $12 million to...

While much of Wall Street and the rest of the financial sector are finally seeing some sun, the storm clouds around Citigroup just don't seem to break. Last Friday, the company said it earned $3.4 billion in its second quarter. It was the second quarter in a row that Citi had announced a profit, after many critics said the company was done for. In a press release, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit triumphantly said, "Our financial results today reflect the incredibly dedicated efforts of all of our people around the world and their success in implementing our plan." But in the...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The top White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers received more than five million dollars last year from the hedge fund D.E. Shaw and collected 2.7 million in speaking fees from Wall Street firms benefiting from government bailout money, The New York Times reported Saturday. Citing new financial information about top officials in the administration of Barack Obama, the newspaper said Summers had made 40 paid appearances, including a speech to the investment firm Goldman Sachs, for which he was paid 135,000 dollars. Summers, a former president of Harvard University and treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, leads...

Lawrence Summers, a top economic adviser to U.S. President Barack Obama, was paid about $5.2 million by hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the past year, disclosure forms released by the White House showed on Friday. Summers was also paid $2.7 million in speaking fees by a range of organizations and companies, including several troubled Wall Street financial firms. The disclosure documents on Summers and other White House officials advising Obama on the global financial crisis covered 2008 and the first few months of this year. Summers became an official adviser on January 20 when Obama took office. Summers, who was...

-Megabanks may be slimmed down, told to prepare plans for own demise They are the biggest of the big — the Citigroups, the Goldman Sachses, the AIGs and other financial behemoths. The Obama administration doesn't want so many around anymore. Financial regulations proposed by the president would result in leaner and simpler institutions that don't carry the weight of the system on their marble columns. Around Washington and Wall Street they have come to be known as TBTF — too big to fail. It's not just size, though. These companies are so far-flung, so intertwined and so precariously leveraged that...

Reuters) – Citigroup Inc has increased interest rates on up to 15 million U.S. credit card accounts just months before curbs on such rises come into effect, the Financial Times reported citing people close to the situation. Citigroup had upped rates on 13 million to 15 million credit cards it co-brands with retailers such as Sears, the paper said.

Drudge Developing: FLASH: CITIGROUP intends to raise salaries by up to 50%; Effort to halt exodus of top traders, bankers... Developing...

The Dow Jones industrial average is adding Travelers Cos. and Cisco Systems Inc., dropping Citigroup Inc. and General Motors Corp. The announcement Monday of the changes to the 30 stocks that make up the best-known barometer of Wall Street comes as GM enters bankruptcy protection, a move that was widely expected. Dow Jones said Travelers, the property and casualty insurer and one-time division of Citicorp, would replace its former parent. Cisco, which makes computer networking gear, is filling the role left by GM after 83 years as part of the Dow. The changes take effect June 8.

Link only, per the rules of King Bloomberg I of New York City news service.

It's no secret that Citigroup board Chairman Richard Parsons has been working for months to repair the financial giant. But, until now, even his closest associates didn't know he also was wrestling with a personal crisis - how to tell his wife and three children he has fathered a child with another woman. Parsons and model-philanthropist MacDella Cooper are the parents of a baby girl named Ella.

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit's job security is increasingly in jeopardy as momentum grows in Washington to oust him.

The nation's largest banks have made quite a comeback. Having nearly brought the market to its knees a few months ago, the financial sector has surprised experts with impressive profits. Citigroup -- widely considered to be the country's weakest big bank -- reported this morning net first-quarter income of $1.6 billion, beating analyst expectations and making it the bank's best quarter since 2007, Citi CEO Vikram Pandit said. Citi's news comes on the heels of reports showing better-than-expected, first-quarter profits by three other major banks: $2.1 billion for JPMorgan Chase, $1.7 billion for Goldman Sachs and $3 billion for Wells...

Thousands are losing their jobs and new skyscrapers are scratching around for tenants, but judging only by its baseball, no-one would know that New York is gripped by recession. Citi Field stadium Two of the most expensive stadiums in American history will open this week, in a lavish £1.7 billion facelift for the Yankees and the Mets, New York's two major league teams. Planned in more affluent times, the replacement of the landmark Shea and old Yankee stadiums with buildings designed to pamper corporate customers has angered fans and non-fans alike. The projects received hundreds of millions of dollars of...

A Citigroup investment management unit is to start fundraising for a new fund that will look to buy up the debt of banks. The new fund under the bank’s fixed income investment management (FIIM) unit will start marketing to investors next week with the hope of raising about $250m, with a mandate for buying up undervalued bank bonds issued by the leading banks, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Trading in shares of Citigroup Inc (C.N) was halted on Thursday pending news on the company, according to the Nasdaq Trader website. Citigroup was last traded at $3.42 per share before the market opened, up 11 percent from its Wednesday closing price of $3.08.

As the uproar soars over taxpayer bailout dollars paying bonuses at AIG, last week, Sanford “Sandy” Weill, the former Chairman and CEO of Citigroup Inc. penned a fawning op-ed to the Obama Administration in Business Week entitled, “Obama’s Tax Plan Will Hurt Non-Profits.” Weill wrote: “Given [Obama’s] popularity, the best thing we have going for us is President Barack Obama. (I believe if there had been an election for President of the world in November, he would have been victorious by multiples of his winning margin in the U.S. election.)… Still, I’d like to add my voice to those in...

Citigroup Inc.'s chief economist is leaving the company for a job at the Treasury Department, according to an internal Citigroup memo. Lewis Alexander, who has been at Citigroup since 1999 and before that worked at the Federal Reserve, will head to the Treasury "to work on domestic financial issues," said the Citigroup memo, which was sent Tuesday. According to a government official, Mr. Alexander will be a counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Mr. Alexander and a Treasury spokesman weren't available to comment Tuesday. A Citigroup spokesman declined to elaborate on the company's memo.

Obviously, Citigroup (C) has continued to be much in the news of late, first becoming a penny stock and then enjoying a nice bounce this past week because, well…(short covering?) For better or worse, I try to focus mainly on the tremendous opportunities that exist in the context of inventing the future of such a vital yet stale industry that is finance. So why, I asked myself, so many posts about Citi? I guess it is impossible to write a blog like mine without posting relatively frequently about Citigroup; every hero need a nemesis right? So I guess in this...

A GREEK militant group threatened to continue its bombing campaign in a statement published yesterday, and claimed recent attacks against Citibank were in response to the international financial crisis. The weekly newspaper Pontiki published a statement from the Revolutionary Struggle group claiming responsibility for a failed car bomb attack on Citibank offices in Athens on 18 February, and a bomb attack on Monday on a suburban Citibank branch. The Pontiki has been used by the militant group in the past to publish its proclamations. In its latest statement, Revolutionary Struggle argued that the American bank was part of a "criminal...

Americans, remember how you gave $700 billion to bailout our nations failing banks, you probably thought that your money would then be used in the United States to get our economy rolling again, after all, we are in the midst of an economic crisis, right? Think again. Citigroup took at least $45 billion of your bailout money and then made an $8 billion dollar loan to the government of Dubai. Bank of America got $45 billion of your money and made a $7 billion investment in China Construction Bank. JPMorgan Chase Bank received $25 billion of your money and made...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Citigroup Inc Chairman Richard Parsons said on Thursday that the bank does not need any more capital injections from the government and expressed confidence that Citi would remain in private hands. Asked in an interview with Reuters whether Citigroup needed additional government capital injections, Parsons said: "No, I think actually, particularly with the latest conversion... Citi is actually one of the better capitalized banks in the world." Parsons was speaking on the sidelines of a Business Roundtable event where President Barack Obama addressed business executives. The Citigroup leader also brushed aside any prospect of the U.S. government...

Barack Obama bought and paid for these banks. They better get in line behind his plan to abolish the secret ballot in unionization elections. That’s Rachel Maddow’s position. The MSNBC host is furious that banks taking bail-out funds have the audacity to do what they think is in the best interest of their businesses, instead of supporting the president’s scheme to do away with what most Americans consider a sacred element of democracy: the secret ballot. Apparently Citi and Bank of America have hosted conference calls in which opposition was expressed to the Obama-backed, Orwellian-named, Employee Free Choice Act, which...

If management e-mails actually “communicated” anything they would be banned. Risks of a leak means workers are subjected to anodyne words on how valued they are or that their company is uniquely positioned to cope with the challenges ahead. On Tuesday, however, a short memo from chief executive Vikram Pandit to staff at Citigroup set the entire US banking sector alight. Having dropped below a dollar last week, Citi’s share price rallied 35 per cent. What did the memo say? Three nuggets in particular seemed to dazzle investors. First that Citi was profitable in January and February and the quarter...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. policymakers must develop a way to handle the failure of a systemically important, financial conglomerate, possibly modeled after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp's procedure for smaller banks, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Tuesday. The FDIC has hinted it could take on that job, with Chairman Sheila Bair saying recently that the agency's model for failed banks works well. But she said the FDIC would need more authority and resources to resolve financial conglomerates. The FDIC insures about $4.5 trillion of deposits at more than 8,000 banks. It has the authority to take over an...

-Musings over my morning coffee - Looks like just another day in the alternate reality we are all participating in. I guess I should have bought Citi shares when they were still a buck a share (Dilemma - Buy stock or a candy bar? Hmmm?). They’re up about 40 cents a share today based on a statement from the bank CEO that Citi made a profit during the first two months of this year. Ironically enough, if you read deeper into the article you find out that the losses that would offset some (or all?) of the profit have not...

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Two top enate Republicans said Sunday that banks shouldn't be able to count on any more bailout money — and that the federal government should let some of them fail rather than distribute further funds to keep them afloat. . . . . . Former GOP presidential candidate John McCain told Fox News Sunday that he did not think President Obama "made the hard decision, and that is to let these banks fail." He did not call for nationalization of troubled financial institutions, which many Republicans oppose, but said their assets should be sold. "Unfortunately, the shareholders...

We are now seeing the third round of bailouts for Citigroup, after the US government already has taken a 36 percent stake in the bank. This makes the US government the largest shareholder of a bank, whose second largest shareholder is Saudi Prince Alaweed Bin Talal. Currently American taxpayers are in hock for 45 billion dollars to bailout Citigroup, while the Treasury, the FDIC and the Federal Reserve cover 90 percent of Citi’s 335 billion dollar losses. The numbers are scary and since most financial experts predict that the bailout isn’t done yet, is likely to only be the beginning....

Citigroup stock drops below $1 a share, relaxed NYSE rule allows continued trading.CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) -- Shares of Citigroup Inc., once the nation's most powerful bank, fell below $1 a share Thursday. The stock fell as low as 97 cents in late morning trading. It was down 11 cents, or 9.7 percent, at $1.02 in mid-afternoon. New York-based Citi has lost more than 85 percent of its value so far this year, and is down more than 95 percent from a year ago as the bank was pummeled by the financial market crisis. Citigroup's shares will remain on the New...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Citigroup Inc. said Tuesday that it will lower mortgage payments for some homeowners to an average of $500 a month for three months as part of a new program to help the unemployed. ... qualify for assistance from Citigroup under the Homeowner Unemployment Assist program include those that are 60 days or more past due on their mortgages or in foreclosure and can pay the reduced amount. Customers must also have a first mortgage loan that is owned and serviced by CitiMortgage Inc. and conforms to government sponsored enterprise limits. The house must also be the...