Posted on 11/25/2008 3:49:36 PM PST by Bokababe
NEW YORK, Nov 25 (Reuters) - Two of New York's four major daily newspapers slammed the board of Citigroup Inc (C.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) on Tuesday, with a New York Post editorial calling for all of the directors to be removed and the Wall Street Journal saying most of them did not deserve to remain.
The day after the government stepped in to rescue the New York-based bank with an injection of $20 billion and a plan to shoulder most of the potential losses on $306 billion of toxic assets, the New York Post said that "they need to go."
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
I remember the good old days when the papers reported the news, they didn’t actively interfere in things.
Via Editorials? That’s exactly where people get to make interference on the robber barons.
To the NY Post and the WSJ! To all my friends.
Jail, jail, no bail. Rubin should be the first to be humiliated and jailed.
But gee that’s a long list. We may not agree on who’s first. :)
Why? The NY Post editors are conservatives.
Well, so am I, what's your point of question EB?
It really is the job of the BOD to remove retarded CEO’s who are willing to bankrupt 100 year old companies and manage the company stock price instead of managing the company.
It’s not the Gubmint’s job.
At least in a free market it is. The WSJ and NY Post are right.
But then we are in the new phase of the USSA.
If they won’t do it, then BFO and angry libs in Congress and pseudo conservatives on forums will do it for them.
The point is that they are right.
Nobody put a gun to the head of the Board and forced them to pay $160 million to a retard (I love FR because PC speak can be thrown out the window), who thought that packaging loans to homeless people sleeping on park benches was a good idea as long as they raked in $500,000,000 in underwriting fees for the CDOs that were sold to dumbasses in foreign Gubmints stupid enough to buy them.
In a free market, the board should be independent and take the place of the underlings and do what he couldn’t do.
I know for a fact that there were people at Wachovia, Citi, UBS who stood up at board meetings 2 years ago and said “this will blow up in our faces, stop packaging this garbage”. They were handed a box and told to clean out their desk.
They went to the board and were told that the Board would help them pack up.
I hope they had the good sense to at least short the stock and make millions that way. It really wouldn’t be insider information. Anybody with a brain, a newspaper or internet access knew that this would blow up.
“If in fact the credit default swap is balanced, i.e., the risk is covered properly on both sides of the transaction, there is really no risk.”
Yeah, and kind of why the original TARP made some kind of sense. All the CDSs where netted out the actual liability could be no worse than the amount of defaulted debt. How bad could that be? And even if the debt went into default there is still some recovery via bankruptcy - I thought even LEH paid 40c on the dollar.
Either Paulson is a dunce or there is something else going on.
“I remember the good old days when the papers reported the news, they didn’t actively interfere in things.”
Actually it was worse in the past.
Bitchslap is what these guys need, it's insulting to hear all the doublespeak, they really think we're buyin' it, hoo boy, if I had the chance!
The French hauled out the headchoppers for alot less than this a few years back.
You know it’s got to be serious when both the NYT and the WSJ agree on something...
“Jeez, who among us hasn’t received a $20 Billion bailout at one time or another?”
Uh, that would be me.
When FASB put this through in th 1990's we raised hell about it.
Under the old ruiles you had: a)Securities held for sale or b)Securities held for investment. Securities under a) had to be marked to market. Securities under b)were held at cost and any unrealized gain or loss footnoted.
As you know, when the market fell apart, the carrying value of the securities went way down which put Bear Sterns and others out.
The thing is that the bulk of those securities are selling for way below their actual realizable value.This is why JP Morgan Chase over the next seven years (the average life of a residential mortgage) is going to be a huge money machine.
What you say is relevant for the CMOs but not for the CDSs written against them. They could be forced to settle. That would remove a lot of the debt. All though so far all of this is not going to fix the current situation - best case if Paulsen’s plan works we remain over levered. The only long term solution is to free up equity capital markets. In the late 90s I did 18 IPOs in 18 months. Crazy. I did one in the last two years. Of the 18 companies only a handful are still around - the rest got PEed or M&Aed. My clients are all thinking debt first. What happened: government induced debt bubble, SarbOx and the ilk, option expensing and ilk, global settlement (don’t get me started), all backed by tax policy that penalizes equity and rewards debt.
Every time I see a CEO on TV whining about no access to debt I yell “sell shares” LOL.
People always assume the corporate CEO's are models of probity; not so. Many are consummate debt junkies and short run maximizers who check their own bonus/401-k plan twice a day and everyone else can go to hell.
The Chairman of the bank I work for is just the same.
I this was the Post.
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