CitiSKANK, CitiHANK, CitRUBIN…all Shitty for Taxpayer…and Why These Bailouts are really FAILouts!

  • Posted by
  • on November 24th, 2008

There are basically two articles you need to read to understand what should have been done and why it is not getting done.

Wall Street is broken, there is no doubt.

Roger explains what need/needed to be done with Citibank . This morning’s ‘FAILout!’ for Citibank is just not getting us close.

Michael Lewis’s great piece ‘The End’ is a well researched and written article about why we don’t get what we need from the people in charge as it relates to proper bailouts. Here is the jist:

You can’t really tell someone that you asked him to lunch to let him know that you don’t think of him as evil. Nor can you tell him that you asked him to lunch because you thought that you could trace the biggest financial crisis in the history of the world back to a decision he had made. John Gutfreund did violence to the Wall Street social order—and got himself dubbed the King of Wall Street—when he turned Salomon Brothers from a private partnership into Wall Street’s first public corporation. He ignored the outrage of Salomon’s retired partners. (“I was disgusted by his materialism,” William Salomon, the son of the firm’s founder, who had made Gutfreund C.E.O. only after he’d promised never to sell the firm, had told me.) He lifted a giant middle finger at the moral disapproval of his fellow Wall Street C.E.O.’s. And he seized the day. He and the other partners not only made a quick killing; they transferred the ultimate financial risk from themselves to their shareholders. It didn’t, in the end, make a great deal of sense for the shareholders. (A share of Salomon Brothers purchased when I arrived on the trading floor, in 1986, at a then market price of $42, would be worth 2.26 shares of Citigroup today—market value: $27.) But it made fantastic sense for the investment bankers.

From that moment, though, the Wall Street firm became a black box. The shareholders who financed the risks had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and as the risk-taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished. The moment Salomon Brothers demonstrated the potential gains to be had by the investment bank as public corporation, the psychological foundations of Wall Street shifted from trust to blind faith.

No investment bank owned by its employees would have levered itself 35 to 1 or bought and held $50 billion in mezzanine C.D.O.’s. I doubt any partnership would have sought to game the rating agencies or leap into bed with loan sharks or even allow mezzanine C.D.O.’s to be sold to its customers. The hoped-for short-term gain would not have justified the long-term hit.

I think Obama needs to read Michael Lewis to understand why bringing in old cronies won’t help fix any of the mess.

In the meantime, don’t get caught up in the hype. The stocks that need to move, if we are recovering, are not.

Let the ‘FAILouts’ continue unabated for now and keep your powder dry.

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