Posted on 11/21/2008 6:39:32 PM PST by rabscuttle385
With the sharp stock-market decline for Citigroup rapidly becoming a full-blown crisis of confidence, the company’s executives on Friday entered into talks with federal officials about how to stabilize the struggling financial giant.
In a series of tense meetings and telephone calls, the executives and officials weighed several options, including whether to replace Citigroup’s leadership or sell all or part of the company. Other options discussed included a public endorsement from the government or a new financial lifeline, people involved in the talks said.
The course of action, however, remained uncertain on Friday night, these people said, and other options may yet emerge.
But after a year of gaping losses and an accelerating decline in its stock price, Citigroup, which has $2 trillion in assets and operations in scores of countries, is running out of time, analysts said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Sure, AVOID it like Amway.
Thanks for the ping.
Got a call from these guys yesterday.
Didn’t bother answering.
LOL - good one!
Why?
You are “not sure how one” gets to my conclusion from what you posted.
Perhaps you should look at your own quoted words:
““Citi is a company of snarky jerks....”
That’s how.
lol. Whatever.
Read all the posts and nobody knows nuthin from nowhere as to where C goes on sunday PM. Suffice to say, C is now a small bank and has been grossly maligned from all quarters. Iffff what Mr. Pandit recently said is true, expect a deal to be in the works. by-the-way: The 50,000 decline in 2008 census is well underway and includes spin-off employees. Back benchers & corpse kickers; how bitter is your venom.. so rare is grace.
Serves me right. Trying to be logical with a self-named Psycho Rabbit.
Oh, puleeze.
I got a stupid question....
For a second, lets ignore the issue of whether government liquidity injections are helpful for overall stability and growth. Let’s assume for the purposes of this discussion that they are necessary. We know what the problems are with the bailouts:
1. Moral Hazard - not the “this isn’t fair, my feelings are hurt” kind, but the consequentialist perspective that they subsidize and incentivize systemic risk by rewarding those who pose risk to the overall financial system, and as a consequence punish those who do not threaten the financial system.
2. Regulatory Uncertainty - because the public is uncertain about what extreme actions the government might take, they reduce their risk exposure by withdrawing from the financial market - refusing to lend, spend & invest.
So riddle me this...
Why has there never been an emergency rescue program planned out that is wide-published, well-known, well-understood and that is designed from the bottom up to punish the risky and reward the prudent & solvent? One that is designed to tell financial institutions that if you become a systemmic risk your stockholders will be wiped out, but if you become part of the solutions your stockholders will inherit a windfall? For example:
* Instead of the govt buying bad assets from TooBigToFail Inc, under certain emergency conditions (Nov 2008 might be one emergency) the FDIC may agree that it will let TBTF go into bankruptcy & get acquired by one (or more) smaller, less risky, more solvent banks, and will then purchase those bad assets from the acquiring banks?
* Instead of the govt bailing out Citi, it spends the $$ to incentivize a group of regional insurers, banks, credit card issuers and/or investment firms to acquire & divide chunks of Citi’s assets. Just like with other bank acquisitions, over the weekend, your bank account gets transfered to a local bank (in Colorado, or New York, or wherever you happen to live), your Traveler’s policy gets transfered to some other insurer, your bank account gets transfered somewhere else. Citi’s bondholders get paid back, and their stockholders get stuck with worthless peices of paper.
Would this not be affective in saving the financial system from catastrophe? Would stockholders not demand that the company not pose systemic risk? Would there not emerge a market segment that is devoted to scooping up failing banks such as Citi during times of crisis?
Is that what we’re calling a straw man, now? “Logical”? You did not address my premise, you only argued from you appeal to emotion.
Appeal to emotion, uh no. Just a mere citation of your own words. There weren’t that many to begin with yet you seem to have difficulty when they are easily quoted to you. Repeatedly.
To paraphrase former GM head Charles Wilson, what’s good for General Motors is good for Citigroup. Have the legal departent bone up on Chapter 11, guys.
Also, he has a full-length book based on this tract, The Ethics of Money Production. I haven't read that yet, but look forward to it.
Thanks for pointing this out.
CA....
Let them fail.
Hopefully, responsible grown-ups will buy a controlling interest at fire-sale prices.
I pay all credit cards online so I have a confirmation and a date. I found too many checks arriving “late” even though mailed 7 to 10 days ahead of the due date. They want you to be late so they can jack up the interest rate. They’re pure evil.
I heard that too! then they will apply to be a bank and be placed under FDIC. Glad to see those boys are being smart with their money. /s
“THAT and fifty cents will get you a cup of coffee.”
At home, maybe. Has anyone noticed the cost of a can of coffee these days? Dang, I think it’s over 7 bucks for a 5lb can!
In another time, of course, you'd have the audience with you as soon as you took the floor, but decades of policy, governmental and otherwise, rewarding the profligate and discouraging the healthy and thrifty, have taken their toll on the body politic, and great effort and time must now be spent reintroducing these very basic things to the public discourse.
Schools, of course, haven't touched these things in years. For our political heroes (such as they are!), it's been decades. The great Ronald Reagan, God bless him, was very much the exception rather than the rule. (Notice, in passing, how the elite media gleefully pronounces the end of the Reagan Revolution?)
Ordinarily, there’d be hope with the parental unit, but one must remember that many, many of them are graduates of public schools within the past 20 or 30 years, so that poses a problem.
Just as Jimmy Carter helped immensely in giving us Reagan, we must hope Obama is made of the same stuff. But while the lead-in to Reagan's election was a time of intellectual ferment (on the Right) and was an exciting time, much more must be done in the next 1500 days. We must seek to raise the level of national discourse to a level probably not seen since the Founding.
Personally, I think that, in itself, translates into an “exciting time”.
Let's make the most of it!
CA....
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