Free Republic

Citigroup announced Tuesday that it’s ending its policy restricting banking services to businesses selling firearms, citing “regulatory developments, recent executive orders and federal legislation.” The policy, which required retailers to limit gun sales to people over 21, was originally implemented in 2018 after a 19-year-old shot and killed 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. However, in a statement released Tuesday, the bank indicated it will “no longer have a specific policy regarding firearms.” “The policy was intended to promote the adoption of best sales practices as prudent risk management and didn’t address the manufacturing of...

A former senior policy adviser to President Barack Obama has been arrested and accused of child sex crimes in Great Britain. According to court documents, Rahamim 'Rami' Shy, a 46-year-old resident of New Jersey, stands accused of arranging a child sex offense, in addition to charges of possessing indecent images of children, according to a report from The Daily Mail. Shy, a US citizen, who lives in New Jersey, worked for the White House under president Barack Obama and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, was arrested in late February by Bedfordshire Police. He was charged the following day and appeared...

The mysterious duo who were pulled over in Coventry, Vt. in the deadly shootout are leftist trans militants with alleged ties to a trans terror cell allegedly involved in three other homicides. On Inauguration Day, the shocking news that a US Border Patrol officer had been shot dead near the Canadian border in Vermont in an incident involving a now-deceased foreign national was overshadowed by coverage of Donald Trump's events in the nation's capital. One week later, a 21-year-old Washington woman was charged over the deadly incident, but little has been reported about her and her deceased accomplice, a German...

Another ESG rat jumps ship: @MorganStanley leaves the illegal Net Zero Banking Alliance . .. @Citi and @BankofAmerica abandoned ship earlier this week. .... What's melting: The illegal ESG cartel. Citigroup and Bank of America drop out of the Net Zero Banking Alliance. ... After ESG and DEI are abandoned, what will be the next grift? ... Music to my ears! Climate change isn't something that can be controlled by human hands, and Net Zero is just a money-making scam. It's that blazing ball of exploding gas in the sky causing it dum dums, and there's nothing we can do...

Not soon after the general election, and within two weeks of each other, two major financial institutions have left a United Nations Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA). This is after they joined three years ago, pledging to require environmental social governance standards (ESG) across their platforms, products and systems. According to the "bank-led and UN-convened" NZBA, global banks joined the alliance, pledging to align their lending, investment, and capital markets activities with a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, NZBA explains. Since April 2021, 145 banks in 44 countries with more than $73 trillion in assets have joined NZBA, tripling...

Citigroup, the international banking giant worth over $300 billion, is suffering from a case of cognitive dissonance when it comes to its banking services policies. Citigroup is holding steadfast to its refusal to provide services to firearm businesses that won’t knuckle under to their gun control demands but is standing by its decision to finance actual weapons of war. Citigroup last week urged its Wall Street staff to “keep their cool” when anti-Israel protestors blocked their New York City headquarters building. The protestors took issue with Citigroups’s alleged financial agreement to support Israel’s purchase of fighter jets from the U.S....

Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser got a 6% pay bump for her performance in 2023, a year the bank's profits dropped 38% and Fraser began a dramatic restructuring that will result in an estimated 20,000 job cuts. The board awarded her total compensation of $26 million, ... The $26 million for Fraser was the lowest among CEO rivals at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, who received between $29 million and $37 million. Bank of America's Brian Moynihan was the only CEO among this group to experience a compensation decline. ... Fraser had a lot...

Its Saturday in Taiwan voting in the Presidential Election underway... Major bank Citigroup planning to cut 20,000 jobs over the next two years... US federal prosecutors seeking the death penalty in a 'hate crime" mass murder... A lot of drama and attention focused on the southern US border and the situation at Eagle Pass, Texas... US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting a top Chinese Communist Party official in Washington... Journalist Gonzalo Lira a citizen of Chile and the US dying in a Ukrainian prison... More strikes underway in Yemen tonight... US politics and Joe Biden talking about a "judgement...

acknowledging a "clearly disappointing" quarter marred by one-off charges that resulted in a $1.8 billion loss. ... in the middle of a multi-year effort to cut bureaucracy, increase profits and boost a stock that has lagged peers ... "The fourth quarter was very clearly disappointing," CEO Jane Fraser .. We know that 2024 is critical." ... layoffs from the sweeping reorganization, Chief Financial Officer Mark Mason ... Citi will also no longer count 40,000 jobs when it spins off and lists its Mexican consumer unit Banamex in an eventual initial public offering, eventually aiming to reach a staffing level of...

Citigroup warned investors late Wednesday that charges tied to the decline of the Argentine peso as well as the bank’s reorganization came in far higher than recently disclosed. The bank said its fourth-quarter results, scheduled to be released Friday morning, were impacted by $880 million in currency conversion losses from the peso and $780 million in restructuring charges tied to CEO Jane Fraser’s corporate simplification project. Those charges are significantly larger than the “couple hundred million dollars” apiece that CFO Mark Mason told investors to expect at a Dec. 6 conference hosted by Goldman Sachs. ... They gave guidance just...

In a surprising development, CITIGROUP has decided to exit the distressed-debt trading business, sending shockwaves through financial markets. This move is not just a business decision; it’s a signal that the economy might be entering a distressed cycle. Several indicators point to an economic downturn on the horizon. Employment growth has slowed, and the 30-Year Treasury Yield recently closed below 4% for the first time since July. Investors seem to be following an old playbook of buying stocks before an anticipated rate-cutting cycle. However, history warns us that this strategy often ends in tears, as rate cuts are typically a...

Jane Fraser said that it was important for employees to collaborate Other Wall Street bosses have expressed frustration at staff working from home Ms Fraser is more open to idea of flexible working than other banking bosses But, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, she said a line had to be drawn Larry Fink, of BlackRock, simply said that ‘remote working has not worked' The British boss of Wall Street banking giant Citigroup yesterday warned that slackers working from home will be hauled back to the office for coaching. Jane Fraser said that it was important for employees to...

Citigroup (C.N) employees expect announcements about management changes and layoffs on Monday in the next phase of the bank’s sweeping reorganization ... Employees are awaiting more details about the scale of layoffs at the bank, which employs 240,000 people worldwide. .... Last month, Citi announced plans to cut management layers from 13 to eight as part of its biggest overhaul in decades. In the two top layers of leadership, Citi reduced 15% of functional roles and eliminated 60 committees, ... The third-largest U.S. lender will also eliminate co-heads of divisions and regional roles, cut 50% of internal financial management reporting...

Banks routinely snitch on customers and even deny services to people politicians don’t like. The House Judiciary Committee is investigating banks for sharing Americans' financial information with the FBI without regard for privacy concerns. In fact, there's no doubt about the threat to civil liberties posed by the government's leverage over the financial industry; that's long established. At question in this investigation is whether the danger to our freedom inherent in that cozy relationship is being wielded in political warfare between the country's political factions. But the larger problem should be fixed no matter what lawmakers discover. "Today, Chairman Jim...

Big US financial groups Charles Schwab, State Street and M&T suffered almost $60bn in combined bank deposit outflows in the first quarter as customers continued to move their money in search of higher returns. The deposit flight has been turbocharged by the collapse last month of Silicon Valley Bank and two other US lenders, with cash moving out of bank accounts at a pace not seen since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In a fresh sign of the threat to traditional banks, Apple and Goldman Sachs on Monday announced the launch of a new savings account in the...

Republican Rep.-elect George Santos comes to Congress in January with a degree from Baruch College and stints at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, according to his campaign biography. But a New York Times investigation revealed Monday that nobody by Santos' name, or a deviation of it, graduated in 2010 from Baruch. Nobody at Citigroup nor Goldman Sachs had a record of Santos working at their offices....

A coalition of 19 state attorneys general from across the country launched a formal investigation into six major U.S. banks last week citing legal concerns about banks’ “ESG” investing and their involvement with a United Nations alliance fighting CO2 emissions.The banks “appear to be colluding with the U.N. to destroy American companies” and undermine the nation’s best interests, one of the AGs warned in a statement e-mailed to The Epoch Times.Another AG argued that these U.N.-inspired banking policies were resulting in jobs being sent to communist China as the regime there continues building coal-fired power plants to ensure low-cost, reliable...

Citigroup Inc. workers who refuse to comply with the company’s vaccine mandate by Jan. 14 will be fired, Bloomberg reports. They will be put on unpaid leave and released from employment at the end of January. Employees will be required to sign an agreement stating that they will not pursue legal action against Citigroup to receive year-end bonus payments. Some workers will still receive certain payments.

Citigroup told employees on Thursday that it would require vaccination against Covid-19 as a condition of employment in the United States, making it the first major bank to issue such a mandate. “It has become crystal clear that Covid-19 will not be going away anytime soon,” Sara Wechter, the company’s head of human resources, wrote in a LinkedIn post describing the new policy. Ms. Wechter cited two catalysts for the decision. First, because the bank does business with the federal government, it has an obligation to comply with President Biden’s executive order requiring vaccination for people working on government contracts....

I am deeply offended that big corporations are trying to bully Georgia into repealing a perfectly reasonable voting integrity law. President Biden lied about the law so egregiously that even the Bezos propaganda outlet, The Washington Post, awarded him 4 Pinocchios. But that didn’t stop some of America’s most prominent corporations from trying to bully Georgia into repealing the law, one which protects legitimate votes from being cancelled out by fraudulent votes.Now, former President Trump is calling for boycotts of the corporations that are acting as political overlords:"For years the Radical Left Democrats have played dirty by boycotting products when...