WB7: Sometimes I like doing the images and letting someone else do the writing. That is why I asked The Cocktailhag if I could republish the following blog post regarding America's not too favorite Too Big To Fail Welfare Queen, CITI, and certain other familiar clowns well known to Zero Hedge readers. The Cocktailhag is a very sharp witted and entertaining writer and I recommend you check out his/her blog which is linked below.
CiTiBanK AMeRiCa'S WeLFaRe QueeN
By The Cocktailhag
A few years late, they finally get around to telling us that America’s Dumbest Bank, Citi-(corp/group/bank/etc., depending on the day), should have been shut down and placed in receivership back in 2008. Of course, that determination was based on niggling “objective criteria” like, say, “solvency” and “liquidity,” which are nice ways to convey that then-(and current!) CEO Vikram Pandit ought to have been pushing a grocery cart down Wall Street, rather than arriving by [WB7: or driving a] limousine.
He worked for Citi, after all, which never found a faddish money scheme it wouldn’t jump on too late and too big; that umbrella on their umpteenth logo turned out to be Wile E. Coyote fending off the boulder more often than not. No normal person who fucked up so completely would ever expect to stay out of jail, let alone keep their cushy “job,” but no matter; unlike when non-bankster Americans screw up big time and default on all of their obligations, Citi has emerged, thanks to government largesse, from the recent unpleasantness bigger and dumber than ever, just like last time, and judging from this little discussion with Timmy Geithner, they’ll be back again. (from Huffpo…)
"…Even so, the consensus to give Citigroup more taxpayer cash “appeared to be based as much on gut instinct and fear of the unknown as on objective criteria,” according to the report. One FDIC official told SIGTARP that policy makers “made a judgment call” on the degree of Citigroup’s importance to the entire fabric of the financial system."
Judgement call? I’ve never heard it called that before. ”Payoff” would be more accurate.
"More than three years later, such judgment calls persist. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who effectively oversaw Citigroup as the then-president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told SIGTARP during an interview last month that it’s not possible to create effective, objective criteria for evaluating the risk a financial firm poses to the system."
How convenient, for some people, anyway. How about restoring Glass-Steagall and enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act, you lying nitwit?
“It depends too much on the state of the world at the time,” Geithner said Dec. 21.
“You won’t be able to make a judgment about what’s systemic and what’s not until you know the nature of the shock.”
By “nature,” he means whether the current miscreants are his friends or not, as we’ve seen time and again, but still he acts like such obvious bribery and corruption are really due to forces more complicated than brain surgery and rocket science, put together, so if anyone feels robbed it’s because they’re dumb.
But wait: it gets worse. Like Bush, who famously said that you just can’t tax rich people, because they cheat anyway, so why bother, Geithner coughs up this hairball of wisdom about the people he’s SUPPOSED TO BE REGULATING, that crashed the economy on HIS watch.
Geithner added that lenders would simply “migrate around” whatever objective criteria policy makers developed in advance.
Then he adds, rather unnecessarily….
"Taxpayers may once again have to support failing financial firms based on gut instinct alone."
If lil’ Timmy’s in charge, I have no doubt.
“In the future we may have to do exceptional things again if we face a shock that large,” Geithner said, according to the report. “You just don’t know what’s systemic and what’s not until you know the nature of the shock.”
Now he’s starting to sound like Peter Sellers in “Being There,” which is understandable but hardly reassuring in the freaking Secretary of the Treasury, given that Citi isn’t even the most powerful or greedy bank “udderly,” if you’ll pardon the bad pun, dependent on what Alan Simpson called the government tit; it’s the runt of the litter. Heaven knows what we’ll have to pay when Goldman or Chase makes a boo-boo with this pathetic crony in charge. You heard it here at CHNN first; if Tim Geithner remains Treasury Secretary, Obama might still be reelected, but he’ll end up wishing he hadn’t.
[By Barry Blitt for NYT]
Oh what a wonderful TBTF World...WB7
WB7: I just want to add that I distinctly remember that right around the time Timmah and friends bailed "Pawned-Its" sorry CITI ass, he (VP) was busy writing stupid self serving OpEds concerning how systemic risk should be responsibily handled going forward. It was a bunch of pompous, disingenuous and moronic bullshit with a capital B!
Banzai!!!
[Link to: Cocktailhag, The Blog ]
h/t to KA
[UPDATE: Here is an interesting link to an article (via Slate) in yesterday's FT, exploring what lessons there are to be learned from industrial safety and nuclear accident experts in relation to financial disasters.
"Perrow believes that finance is a perfect example of a complex, tightly coupled system. In fact, he says, its complexity "exceeds the complexity of any nuclear plant I ever studied".
So if the bankers and their regulators did start paying attention to the unglamorous insights of industrial safety experts, what might they learn?"
Three Mile Island, The Challenger Shuttle and Lehman Brothers