[jeffkrol]

Citigroup Urges Approval of SEC Subprime Settlement - BusinessWeek

The company made misstatements on earnings calls and in financial filings about assets tied to subprime loans as the housing crisis unfolded in 2007, the SEC said July 29 in its complaint. Some disclosures omitted more than $40 billion in investments, the SEC said.

BAM....... book em dano

Crittenden, who left the bank last year, agreed to pay $100,000 to settle claims he didn’t disclose the risk after getting internal briefings. Arthur Tildesley, Citigroup’s former head of investor relations, will pay $80,000 to settle claims that he helped draft disclosures that misled investors, the SEC said.

As to the "big guy'

Citigroup Inc. urged a judge to approve a $75 million settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over claims the bank misled investors by failing to disclose $40 billion in subprime-related holdings

Citigroup Urges Approval of SEC Subprime Settlement - BusinessWeek

The agency also argued that it was big enough to serve as a deterrent for similar offenses, but small enough not to hurt innocent shareholders.................."The proposed penalty amount achieves a fair balance between providing compensation to injured shareholders without unfairly burdening current shareholders," SEC lawyers wrote. "The proposed $75 million penalty represents less than 0.3 percent of Citigroup’s revenue for the most recent quarter, and should not cause an undue negative financial impact on the company’s business, or significant harm to current Citigroup shareholders. At the same time, the penalty could provide relief to shareholders harmed by the misrepresentations alleged in the complaint."

SEC Defends $75 Million Subprime Settlement With Citigroup

[Nesster]

... and to make up for it all, give em money at near zero, and let them lend it back to us at 4%...

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Anyway, beside borrowing money from the Federal government and lending it back to them at a higher rate, who else would you lend it to? McDonald’s? Johnson & Johnson? GE? Every TBTF corporation in the United States of America and the world?

And if I was a company, what would I do? I’d probably be expecting inflation and trying to lock these suckers up as long as possible.

Maybe, just maybe, the Great American Bond Bubble, isn’t caused by a flight to safety as Siegel and Schwartz hypothesize, and is due to excessive capital allocation, you know, kind of like every bubble in the history of mankind. But what do I know, I don't even have access to a Bloomberg terminal.

*The Fed Fund Rate is the rate at which commercial banks can borrow from the Federal Reserve. Since 2008, every major investment bank, Goldman Sachs & Morgan Stanley (through changes in registration), Bank of America, Citigroup, and every other major bank has access. It’s a powerful tool, people believe that low rates of 4% during the Greenspan error is what caused the housing bubble. But hey, what are the odds that rates 1/16th the amount could cause any kind of market distortion?