[jeffkrol]

Not too shabby, though it's not over with yet..

Treasury says sale of 1.5 billion shares of Citigroup stock brings government $6.2 billion
By Martin Crutsinger, AP
May 27th, 2010
Treasury gets $6.2 billion from Citigroup sales
WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department said Wednesday it raised $6.2 billion from the sale of 1.5 billion shares of Citigroup stock it received as part of the government’s rescue of the bank.
The sales took place over the past month and represented 19.5 percent of the government’s holdings of Citigroup common stock.
Treasury said it has triggered a second round of stock sales through its agent, Morgan Stanley. That will involve an additional 1.5 billion shares.
The government said it would not sell shares during the blackout period set by Citigroup in advance of its second quarter earnings release. That period is expected to begin on July 1. Treasury has previously said it hopes to sell all of its Citigroup shares this year.
The sales are the government’s latest move to recoup the costs of the $700 billion financial bailout.
The stock sold for an average price per share of around $4.33, Treasury said.
In late afternoon trading, Citi stock was trading at $3.90, up 12 cents from Tuesday’s close. The stock has traded in a range of $2.55 to $5.43 over the past 52 weeks.
The Financial Times reported Wednesday that the Qatar Investment Authority was considering buying a portion of Treasury’s stake in Citi.
Treasury purchased the common stock in the summer of 2009 at a share price of $3.25. It received the original 7.7 billion shares of Citigroup common stock, which amounted to 27 percent of the company, in return for an investment of $25 billion in the company.

Citi, one of the hardest-hit banks during the financial crisis, received $45 billion in bailout money. That was one of the largest rescues by the government.

Of the $45 billion, $25 billion was converted to a government ownership stake in Citi last summer. The bank repaid the other $20 billion in December.

AP Business Writer Marcy Gordon contributed to this report.

Treasury says sale of 1.5 billion shares of Citigroup stock brings government $6.2 billion
US Treasury Announces That Financial Intitutions Have Returned Majority Of the Federal Aid

"TARP repayments have continued to exceed expectations, substantially reducing the projected cost of this program to taxpayers," said Assistant Secretary for Financial Stability Herb Allison. "This milestone is further evidence that TARP is achieving its intended objectives: stabilizing our financial system and laying the groundwork for economic recovery."

TARP repayments officially surpassed total TARP funds outstanding in May when Treasury completed its sale of 1.5 billion shares of Citigroup – a transaction that provided gross proceeds of $6.18 billion to taxpayers.

In addition to the $194 billion in TARP repayments, the report also showed that taxpayers have also received a further return on TARP investments of $23 billion through dividends, interest, and other income. Overall combined TARP revenues (repayments and other income) totaled $217 billion through the end of May.

The overall projected cost of the TARP program has declined dramatically as repayments to taxpayers continued to exceed expectations. In May, Treasury notified Congress that the projected lifetime cost of TARP has decreased by $11.4 billion to $105.4 billion since the FY 2011 President's Budget. As recently as the Midsession Review released last August, the Administration estimated the cost of TARP would be $341 billion. Going forward, over the life of the program, additional TARP expenditures beyond those that have occurred through May 2010 are expected to be made for housing initiatives and other programs, such as those to assist smaller banks and the securitization markets, but Treasury still expects that repayments will continue to exceed outstanding amounts.

Not too shabby, though it's not over with yet..

Treasury says sale of 1.5 billion shares of Citigroup stock brings government $6.2 billion
US Treasury Announces That Financial Intitutions Have Returned Majority Of the Federal Aid

Here's the $700 billion dollar question. Will the money be put back as it was suppose to have been? Or will it be squandered as Frank wanted to before do it ever gets back to the general fund?

Here's a link for you with a chart listing repayments by bank. (I know Jeff, you never thought I'd help you out.)

"It’s great that some financial institutions are paying the money back. It’s not going to be so great if this administration immediately takes this money and shoves it out the door for some other big government boondoggle," said Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), who serves on the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP and wants the program shut down.

One reason the TARP fund has gotten a substantial sum of money back is that BofA and other financial giants desperately wanted to get out from under the government’s heel on the issue of executive pay. The repayments also reflect Wall Street’s stunning resilience.

Plain-vanilla banks, however, are still dealing with piles of bad loans that could get worse or more numerous as foreclosures keep surging and unemployment remains high. Ironically, many of those bad loans represented a big portion of the assets that TARP was initially designed to purchase. The fund has done little to address that problem directly, however, spending only $27 billion on an initiative to buy up "toxic" mortgage assets in partnership with private investors.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, said the initial capital infusions to thaw the frozen credit system succeeded in helping quell financial panic, even if it proved highly unpopular because it bailed out companies that helped cause the crisis, he said.

Zandi estimated that all but $100 billion to $150 billion would be returned to taxpayers, a much better return than predicted last fall. But that won’t change the American public’s opinion of the program, he said.

However it seems as though TARP itself is a toxic asset.

[jeffkrol]

Moody's thinks Florida is recovering? Me thinks someone has been smoking some wacky weed to much. And that's not just me saying that.

[jeffkrol]

Moody's thinks Florida is recovering? Me thinks someone has been smoking some wacky weed to much. And that's not just me saying that.

As of December 31, 1999, the thrift crisis had
cost taxpayers approximately $124 billion and the
thrift industry another $29 billion, for an estimated
total loss of approximately $153 billion. The losses
were higher than those predicted in the late 1980s,
when the RTC was established, but below those forecasted
during the early to mid-1990s, at the height of
the crisis.

Add another billion in lost legal battles......

At the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, judgments have been rendered
in six cases, awarding the plaintiffs $983 million from the federal government.27 Four of
these cases were on appeal to the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals; the other two were
recent decisions, and appeals are likely. In another five cases, settlements have been reached
with plaintiffs receiving approximately $135 million. Another 3 cases had been tried and were
awaiting decision; 7 cases had been dismissed; 12 cases had been consolidated with others; and
miscellaneous actions have been taken in 3 others.
In cases involving approximately 40 failed thrifts, the FDIC as successor to the closed institutions

Hope you just as enraged back then but for some reason I believe not......... lets just round the S&N crisis to 2.25 Billion in older dollars.
http://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/banking/2000dec/brv13n2_2.pdf
Peanuts as to what could have happened... though you obviously doubt that. UC for GM would probably set us back that much... as well as "welfare" for all the lost pensioners..

Zandi estimated that all but $100 billion to $150 billion would be returned to taxpayers, a much better return than predicted last fall. But that won’t change the American public’s opinion of the program, he said

ADDENDUM:

"All of us are harmed immensely when we have a financial crisis," says Doug Elliott, an economics fellow at the Brookings Institution. If banks had been adequately regulated before the crisis, many Americans who are unemployed today would still have jobs. This bill, he says, can't prevent future crises since financial systems are just as fallible as the humans who run them. However, the bill, if passed, "will make crises less frequent, and less substantive when they do happen."

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/article/financial-reform-bill-means-big-consu...1012343&page=3
Points and counter points (what would you expect).
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dc-airs-range-of-reactions-to-financial-ref...dist=countdown
APPARENTLY.. too many compromises.....

The financial crisis of fall 2008 revealed serious dangers have developed in the heart of the world’s financial system. The Bush-Obama bailouts of 2008-09 confirmed that our biggest banks are “too big to fail” and the left, center, and right can agree with Gene Fama when he says: “too big to fail” is perverting activities and incentives.

This is not a leftist message, although you hear people on the left make the point. But people on the right also increasingly understand what is going on – there is excessive and abusive power at the heart of our financial system that completely distorts markets (and really amounts to a hidden, unfair and dangerous taxpayer subsidy).

This administration and this Congress had ample opportunity to confront this problem and at least wrestle hard with it. Some senators and representatives worked long and hard on precisely this issue. But the White House punted, repeatedly, and elected instead for a veneer of superficial tweaking. Welcome to the next global credit cycle – with too big to fail banks at center stage.

http://baselinescenario.com/2010/06/21/dead-on-arrival-financial-reform-fails/
One more for study.............
http://baselinescenario.com/2010/05/26/wall-street-ceos-are-nuts/
LOVE this part.................

The other, and perhaps most important thing Heileman’s article shows is that Wall Street executives are a bunch of raving lunatics. Here’s one paragraph:

“Today, it’s hard to find anyone on Wall Street who doesn’t speak of Obama as if he were an unholy hybrid of Bernie Sanders and Eldridge Cleaver. One night not long ago, over dinner with ten executives in the finance industry, I heard the president described as ‘hostile to business,’ ‘anti-wealth,’ and ‘anti-capitalism’; as a ‘redistributionist,’ a ‘vilifier,’ and a ‘thug.’ A few days later, I recounted this experience to the same Wall Street CEO who’d called the Volcker Rule a testicular blow, and mentioned I’d been told that one of the most prominent megabank chiefs, who once boasted to friends of voting for Obama, now refers to him privately as a ‘Chicago mob guy.’ Do all your brethren feel this way? I asked. ‘Oh, not everybody—just most of them,’ he replied. ‘Jamie [Dimon]? Lloyd [Blankfein]? They might not say Obama’s a socialist, but they come pretty close.’”

This is wingnut, Tea Party, willful blindness to reality kind of stuff. Forget the whole issue of whether they should be grateful to Obama for first saving their banks from collapse and then toning down the reform bill so it (a) doesn’t break up their banks, (b) doesn’t meaningfully prevent them from engaging in proprietary trading, (c) says nothing of substance about compensation, (d) doesn’t set any hard capital requirements, (e) . . . The fact that they can see the policies this administration is pursuing and somehow think they are “anti-wealth” or “anti-capitalist” is as close to proof as you will find that they are deeply stupid, blinded by their self-interest, or both.

And a teaser
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/05/cbo-stimulus-raised-gdp-17-to-42-in-q1.html

Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output from January 2010 Through March 2010

Andddd.. someone "gets it"

“Instead, that guilt lies with the mortgage brokers themselves. They only cared about generating fees, they falsified appraisals... this was the sad underbelly of mortgage finance in the US."
Paulson was not only skeptical about the subprime mortgage market, he bet against it, earning between $3 billion and $4 billion for himself in 2007.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/37918926/

Jeff, this guy in this link owns the tatoo shop in the strip plaza my company is in.

Housing Bubble Hall of Shame®: Sonny Kim
http://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/civil/house-flipper-sonny-kim-to-plead-g...-fraud/1102796

[jeffkrol]

What's your point? Capitalism at it's finest? Maybe we need some regulations...

• Kim bought a house that had been identified by a co-conspirator as being easy to purchase for a cheap price. Often these homes were in disrepair.

• Frequently, the co-conspirator who found the house for Kim to purchase would then buy the house from Kim. At closing, this buyer would use money Kim loaned to him or her to make the down payment. The down payment would give the lender the impression the buyer had the means to pay back the loan, which they didn't. The lender never knew that Kim and the co-conspirator were in cahoots.

• After receiving the bank loan, Kim would pay the buyer a small sum for their cooperation in the scam. "(Kim) knew it was wrong to provide funds to the buyers for down payments and to provide the buyers with a financial incentive to purchase the property in the first place," the plea agreement states.

• The people who bought from Kim falsified claims on loan documents and never intended to live in the house or pay off the loans. The homes would then get foreclosed on, but Kim and the buyer had already been paid.

The scam corrodes the entire premise of buying a home. The straw buyers paid off by Kim — and enabled by a raft of real estate insiders — borrowed millions not because they wanted to live in the homes they were buying. Instead, they were "motivated by the fact that they were actually being paid to assume the role of 'purchaser,' " the plea agreement states.

Hagar said Kim represents a promising lead for investigators. He said even though the indictment doesn't name other individuals, it explicitly describes those who played roles in the wider scheme.

"The $6 million they mention in the indictment is chump change to what this network represents," Hagar said. "This is the way (federal officials) work a case. They'll get the cooperation of someone like Kim and work their way up. This is going to be much larger

And a 'Fraud Expert' stated that 'it was obvious the banks weren't paying attention'. Ya' think? Too bad they couldn't, or wouldn't, put a stop to this when it was 'obviously' taking place. They could have read some of the housing bubble blogs if they needed help.

Thought you said it was all the "little people" that should have known better......

What's your point? Capitalism at it's finest? Maybe we need some regulations...



Thought you said it was all the "little people" that should have known better......

What you libs fail to get it seems it that we Conservatives are fully for SMALL government not no government. What is so hard to understand about the concept? Are DemoKKKrats not smart enough to get it?


Hey I have the same sticky KKKey as jojiba

[jeffkrol]

What you libs fail to get it seems it that we Conservatives are fully for SMALL government not no government. What is so hard to understand about the concept? Are DemoKKKrats not smart enough to get it?


Hey I have the same sticky KKKey as jojiba

But you want the "small" gov. to hover around you thinking that whats good for YOU is good for others... What don't you get?
BTW remember you contributed to the "immigration problem" when you let them build your house.. Correct me if I'm mistaken since I only remember part of the conversation....

But you want the "small" gov. to hover around you thinking that whats good for YOU is good for others... What don't you get?
BTW remember you contributed to the "immigration problem" when you let them build your house.. Correct me if I'm mistaken since I only remember part of the conversation....

Actually I don't want them thinking that at all. There are certain standards that need to be met. Like when my house was built. I sure am glad there is a building code around. And I am glad we had inspections. And Jeff, when I build structures on my property, even though I am building them myself, they are usually better than code.

I am not sure if illegals were used or not. My supposition is that they probably were. But would I swear to it? Not on your life. Well, second thought, maybe on your life.