Blogs: Posts Tagged ‘ citigroup ’

As expected, the bill contains no curb on too-big-to-fail institutions.
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Without a loophole to grab hold of, every entrepreneur is threatened.
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Go with the fraud and make big bux or fight & get fired, earning the right to battle for your job back in court for five or six years, with a less-than-10-percent shot at winning.
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Somewhere, Rene Magritte is smiling (from the WSJ): Herbert Allison, who oversees the Treasury’s $700 billion financial rescue plan, disagreed with members of a congressional oversight panel that some financial firms benefit from the assumption that the government would step in to prevent their failure. “There is no too big to fail guarantee on...
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The housing crisis seems to be entering a new phase, with government programs that had been designed to try to keep people in their homes now being subtly shifted into a program meant to ease them out. One sign was this e-mail that came today with the headline, “Understanding the New Rules of the...
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This makes total sense. Right? The WSJ estimates CitiGroup’s exposure to Dubai World’s defaulted $80 billion (est.) debt at $1.9 billion. The beauty part is Andrew Sorkin’s reminder (in the NYT) that Citi lent $8 billion to the palm-island-building megajoke last Dec. 14, shortly after the U.S. government pumped $45 billion into the ailing...
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Yesterday (Nov. 12) was the 10th anniversary of the signing ceremony for the Gramm Leach Bliley Act. Though hailed at the time as a great breakthrough in financial regulatory reform—headlines predicted the coming time of consumer plenty, big savings on mutual funds, insurance premiums and bank fees—it was never anything more than a scheme...
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Alan Greenspan has changed his mind, proving finally that he has one. As Bloomberg reports, Greenspan told the influential crowd at the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday that the too-big-to-fail doctrine must end: “If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big,” Greenspan said today. “In 1911 we broke up Standard Oil—so what happened?...
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The Wall Street Journal crunched some numbers and declared that, even though 10 percent of U.S. citizens are out of work while most of the rest are taking pay cuts, the Gilliganesque bunglers in the financial sector are again partying like its 1999, only more so. According to the Journal: Total compensation and benefits...
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The New York Times says CitiGroup is selling its secretive oil-trading arm, Phibro, to Occidental Petroleum, apparently to avoid bad publicity. Still no one’s questioning the idea that the head guy in a business division that yields $400 million a year is all by himself worth $100 million a year.
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Good news today as Bloomberg News won its federal lawsuit to find out which giant corporations the Federal Reserve lavished big money on, and how much. It’s pretty outrageous that it took a nine-month legal battle to get this basic information, but that’s life in a democracy, right? Of course, in addition to its...
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Strange doings over the last few days in Central Florida have put about 10,000 Maryland homeowners in doubt about where to send their mortgage checks. But the real trouble is much bigger than that. Here’s a rundown on who, what, where, how, and maybe why: 1. Because of bad mortgage lending, mostly in Florida,...
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