From yesterday's Daily Finance piece, "Why Citi is in a rush to pay back its last $20 billion in TARP." And the U.S. isn't going to let Citi out of TARP without coming up with a way of dealing with those $301 billion in sick assets, according to BusinessWeek......So the answer for Citi appears to be raising about $20 billion in new capital from investors. That funding could come in the form of $10 billion in equity and $10 billion of other securities. At about $4 a share, Citi is trading at a significant discount to the assets on its books. And one analyst told BusinessWeek: "People will think it's a great deal."
Problem is, the books are probably wildly optimistic. Citi hold many complex assets with the potential for becoming toxic. And don't forget the assets off Citi's books -- called special purpose entities (SPEs), which helped wipe out Enron. Citi has $996.6 billion worth of SPEs. I'm not sure we can be confident that these will not blow up -- particularly considering that they consist of highly risky paper from student loans, subprime mortgages and credit card receivables.
Considering the troubled assets Citi is holding that have yet to recover, if the U.S. lets it sucker some investors into buying equity so it can pay back the $20 billion TARP -- and go back to the days of high risk and huge bonuses -- taxpayers will end up being saddled with a bigger bill further down the road.
This scum-sucking rat post contains all the relevant links that show the history of Citibank's brand of corporate criminality and/or deception, all over the World, including Enron, Ohio, California, Mexico, Russia. For more visit Citibankisracist blog.
US Bank Money Laundering -
ReplyDeleteEnormous By Any Measure
By James Petras
Professor of Sociology, Binghamton University
9-1-2
For example, in the case of Raul Salinas, PB personnel at Citibank helped Salinas transfer $90 to $100 million out of Mexico in a manner that effectively disguised the funds' sources and destination thus breaking the funds' paper trail.
In routine fashion, Citibank set up a dummy offshore corporation, provided Salinas with a secret code name, provided an alias for a third party intermediary who deposited the money in a Citibank account in Mexico and transferred the money in a concentration account to New York where it was then moved to Switzerland and London.
The PICs are designed by the big banks for the purpose of holding and hiding a person's assets. The nominal officers, trustees and shareholder of these shell corporations are themselves shell corporations controlled by the PB. The PIC then becomes the holder of the various bank and investment accounts and the ownership of the private bank clients is buried in the records of so-called jurisdiction such as the Cayman Islands.
Private bankers of the big banks like Citibank keep pre-packaged PICs on the shelf awaiting activation when a private bank client wants one. The system works like Russian Matryoshka dolls, shells within shells within shells, which in the end can be impenetrable to a legal process.
The complicity of the state in big bank money laundering is evident when one reviews the historic record. Big bank money laundering has been investigated, audited, criticized and subject to legislation; the banks have written procedures to comply. Yet banks like Citibank and the other big ten banks ignore the procedures and laws and the government ignores the non-compliance.