Yeah! and some Saudi prince dumped a wad of cash into them, along with a Singapore (?) bank, to prop 'em up.

My wife just dumped a 401k from Putnam investments. Their check was on Citibank, which I deposited yesterday. The said it will be a few days before the check clears...... I'm gonna sweat bullets until it does. This is too much pucker factor for me.

GMA reported Citi will lay off 4,000, but other rumors have been all over the place. They are taking a big writedown, also reported from $12 bil to $24 bil in variious sources. The daytrader forums seem to agree that Citi is toast. BTW, somebody on Tickerforum sounds a lot like you??

$itigroup is the only bank I have received personalised junk mail from offering me a loan without my requesting information or being in an existing business relationship. [Warning to marketing departments: I hate this sort of junk mail]

It seems that they have been desperate for people to take loans that they have had to trawl to the edge of nowhere looking for business.

Nope got banned after I told the site owner (KD/Genesis) that his veggie VW was not going to save him from the effects of PO.

He also seems to think ameika has enough oil for our own internal consumption and that "lefties" should be pulled out in the street and shot for not allowing ANWR to be drilled.

He has been dead wrong about gold and oil.

4 months ago he was well into the hyper inflation pond and has since made the journey to deflation.

He has been right about the markets, but how hard is that? We here at PO have known about the housing crash and economic ramifications of PO for years.

PO will be defined by the collapse of global economies.

THAT is a no brainer.

Same here. No wonder CITI is circling the drain. I ripped off their retarded asses.

I had an inactive CITI Mastercard. To entice me to use the card again they sent me an offer of 0.9% financing for 6 months and enclosed blank checks.

So, I wrote myself a check for my full limit of $15000 and slapped it down on my mortgage.

(I paid off the 15000 balance in full after 6 months.)

I earned the spread, totally risk free. Thanks for the free money, CITI

It's banks that are (part of) the cause of the high inflation. So they didn't give you free money; they just ripped you off less than normal.

Roccman, yeah, I noticed the shift in thinking there! Kinda funny. Well, lurking there, I did figure out that the time for paper investments had passed for me and dumped all that, not knowing enough to play the game.

Looks to me like the woes of Citi and the rest of the finance thing are going to impact the economy first, then be made worse by falling oil supplies. What's your take on it?

I get some of my best financial news from safehaven - the posters are PO aware and factor in PO in their thinking.

http://www.safehaven.com/forum-1.htm

Bud Conrad at Casey Research has been spot on with stagflation, oil, rate cuts, the dollar, and gold:

http://www.caseyresearch.com/displayEditorBio.php?id=31

Bud also posts on Bill Tamblyn's yahoo group that is, bar none, the best tech group on the web WRT PO/Geopolitics.

What do I think...??

All banks will fail...will be consolidated (read nationalized) under one - I think JP Morgan - and oil will soar to $1000.

But then again - I could be full of shit.

I get that spew from hard-core right wingers all the time.

It's interesting to watch the dynamics of different types of boards in response to management styles. Market Ticker has the omniscient father figure type of management, which results in group think which spirals off into errors pretty quickly. I post some at The Motley Fool; I owe some allegiance 'cause that's where I learned about investing. But their peer system of recommendations also leads to group think. It turns into a popularity contest where ideas have a hard time standing up on their own. It's still a useful place to take the temperature of the savvier, more responsible end of the investing world.

I've got to give Aaron kudos, again, for allowing the free speech here. The freewheeling format allows me to say what I want to here, without restrictions. It's the only place I can come to work things through without having the thought police come down on me.

Slightly off topic, sorry Rocc. The fear is growing in the financial sector, and group think is going to be an issue.

It's going to be really fun watching Citi go down.

They took $8k of debt I had with them, pumped it up to $12k, then are telling me they'll settle for $6k. Sorry guys, go fish. I don't' have it. Never will. Too bad.

The actual most revenge I can have against the Beast is to make as little as I need to get by (30 hours a week @ minimum wage, or the equivalent wages, are safe from garnishment, make any more than that and the additional will get garnished, I can live within the nongarnishable amount) and just watch the banksters go high and dry.

Citi is dead. They destroyed any remaining shred of credibility they had left.

They took 3 days to respond to the rumor of a dividend cut. Which THEY DENIED.

Today, they went ahead and CUT the dividend 40%.

Don't worry. Tyler_JC will show up soon to explain everything. Not a problem. In the meantime, head on over to Kohl's or Home Depot and buy some shit!

Citigroup means Saudis - Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is the largest shareholder in Citigroup

At an investor presentation in May, Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit said shrinking the bank's $2.2 trillion balance sheet, the biggest in the U.S., was a cornerstone of his turnaround plan.

Nowhere mentioned in the accompanying 66-page handout were the additional $1.1 trillion of assets that New York-based Citigroup keeps off its books: trusts to sell mortgage-backed securities, financing vehicles to issue short-term debt and collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, to repackage bonds.

Now, as Citigroup prepares to announce second-quarter results July 18, those off-balance-sheet assets, used by U.S. banks to expand lending without tying up capital, are casting a shadow over earnings. Since last September, at least $100 billion of assets have flooded back onto Citigroup's balance sheet, accompanied by more than $7 billion of losses.

``If you start adding up all the potential exposures, it's a huge number,'' said Sam Golden, a former ombudsman for the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency who now heads the financial-industry practice for restructuring adviser Alvarez & Marsal in Houston. ``The banks will say that it was disclosed. Investors are saying, `Yeah, but it was cryptic. We really didn't know what you were telling us.'''
http://waronyou.com/forums/index.php?topic=475.0

Citigroup Posts $2.5 Billion Loss on Fresh Write-Downs LINK By LOUISE STORY
Published: July 19, 2008:
A year into the tight credit market, and the losses keep coming. Citigroup said Friday morning that it lost $2.5 billion, or 54 cents a share, in the second quarter. The loss was largely caused by $7.2 billion of write-downs of Citigroup’s investments in mortgages and other loans and by a weakness in the consumer market, which cost Citigroup $4.4 billion in credit losses and $2.5 billion to increase reserves.

But the chief executive, Vikram Pandit, positioned the $2.5 billion loss as progress. Last quarter, the financial conglomerate lost $5.1 billion. “We cut our second-quarter losses in half compared to the first quarter,” Mr. Pandit said in a statement. “While there is still much to do, we are encouraged by our progress.”

Citigroup is a barometer of the pain felt in all parts of the financial industry, and the company’s results show the downturn spreading from the credit markets to the real economy. Consumers — stung by high oil and food prices — are falling behind on their mortgages, auto loans and credit cards. Increasingly, that pain is being felt beyond the United States.

The bank has recorded more than $56 billion in credit losses and write-downs in the last four quarters. Citigroup lost more than $17 billion in that time. And its share price has fallen nearly 70 percent since the credit market began to tighten. In premarket trading, Citigroup shares rose as high as $19.27, after closing Thursday at $17.97.

Mr. Pandit has overseen sweeping asset sales to try to shore up the company’s balance sheet and free the bank of its riskiest assets. Citigroup said on Friday that it sold an additional $99 billion of assets in the quarter, and two-thirds of them were investments made under his predecessor, Charles O. Prince III, who was ousted last fall. The bank is also selling businesses like CitiCapital Diners Club International and its German retail banking unit. Those companies will bring in billions of dollars.

Citigroup’s revenue was $18.7 billion, down 29 percent, mostly because of its write-downs. In addition to mortgage bond deteriorating, Citigroup was hurt by a drop in the credit quality of companies that reinsure its bonds. Operating expenses were up 9 percent at $15.9 billion, in part because of charges taken while the bank lays off thousands. So far this year, the bank has reduced its work force by 11,000.

Citigroup’s credit card income fell around the world, with North America the hardest hit but growing problems evident elsewhere. Troubled spots included Brazil, India and Mexico where there was a rise in past-due payments and credit costs. Citigroup continued to be stung by lower securitization revenues, as the pipeline for repackaging loans into bonds remained frozen.

Bank executives said a recovery would take two to three years. “This isn’t like a sprint. This really is a marathon,” Gary L. Crittenden, Citigroup’s finance chief, said last week. On Thursday, Merrill Lynch announced a loss of $4.8 billion, surprising even the most pessimistic analysts. The loss was largely caused by another $9.7 billion in write-downs in mortgage investments. Merrill was forced to raise capital by selling assets like its 20 percent stake in Bloomberg, the financial data service mostly owned by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York.

Also on Thursday, JPMorgan Chase said its quarterly income fell 53 percent from the second quarter last year.