So patch up the FIRE engine–cost, laws and sanity be damned.

From 24/7wallst.com, Doglas A. McIntyre

(quote)

What Geithner has found out, most of all, is that he has his interrogators cornered. Each and every one of them knows that the banking system cannot be allowed to fail and that no one is certain how to fix it. Too much criticism could lead to public anxiety about the entire set of programs meant to repair the broken financial and credit markets and suddenly there may be much more to fear than fear itself.

Geithner has finished answering questions. He has gained the leverage to keep secret.

(end quote)

No wonder why China is busy trading it’s dollars and Ttreasury notes for assets and comoodity sources that they know will go up.

Simple maths tell us all, that with out help they would DIE, MORTE, FIN.

How can you make a profit, with the life blood of the tax payers stuck in your arm, et al transfusion.

Hell did someone force them to create this synthetic BS, then spread it through every molecule of the investing construct, NO.

Now they need help from the little people to make them hole again, shezzz what buddy fkers, pipers me thinks, never ending gluttony, is that one of the deadly sins, humm.

I wonder if, their even American in heart, do not what you can for your self , but what can you do for your country eh. Who will you be remembered when the tally is weighed.

Skippy…who are we…slaves…or free men and women. I would be poor and free, before slavery.

After PPIP, the taxpayer will have all the crud on their book, PIMCO et all will have a highly leveraged and hard to lose on bet, and the Wall Street banks will have a huge retail deposit base to support their gambling operations with the rubbish off their books.

I think we should find out if GS/JPM et al. are currently employing Gary Kasparov.

The Case of the Missing Month
http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/the-case-of-the-missing-month/

So what was the A.I.G. effect in December? They did not say. Is it possible the loss then would have been larger without the A.I.G. bailout? We’ll see if any analyst asks.

7:15 a.m.| December Write-Offs: They did discuss December up front (unlike in the news release). It sounds as if they took write-offs everywhere, including commercial real estate and private equity. They took more write-offs in both of those areas in the first quarter.

So how did they make money? One answer is that this is a great time to be in the banking business — if you ignore what we politely call legacy assets. Customers are desperate for cash, and will pay for it. Fees are up. If underwriting volumes continue to rise, this could be a great, great year. Assuming, of course, that the write-offs are over.

6:50 a.m.| Where’s December?: Goldman Sachs reported a profit of $1.8 billion in the first quarter, and plans to sell $5 billion in stock and get out of the government’s clutches, if it can.

How did it do that? One way was to hide a lot of losses in not-so-plain sight.
Goldman’s 2008 fiscal year ended Nov. 30. This year the company is switching to a calendar year. The leaves December as an orphan month, one that will be largely ignored. In Goldman’s earnings statement, and in most of the news reports, the quarter ended March 31 is compared to the quarter last year that ended in February.

The orphan month featured — surprise — lots of write-offs. The pretax loss was $1.3 billion, and the after-tax loss was $780 million.

Would the firm have had a profit if it had stuck to its old calendar, and had to include December and exclude March?

CITIGROUP – QUARTERLY FINANCIAL DATA SUPPLEMENT 1Q09
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/831001/000110465909024705/a09-10245_1ex99d2.htm

Average Assets (in billions of dollars) in INSTITUTIONAL CLIENTS GROUP
SECURITIES AND BANKING is down 27%

Average Assets (in billions of dollars) in Global Cards, is down 66%

Average Assets (in billions of dollars) in CONSUMER BANKING is down 16%

Average Assets (in billions of dollars) in CONSUMER FINANCE JAPAN is down 11%

Average Assets (in billions of dollars) in GLOBAL WEALTH MANAGEMENT is down 13%

Average Assets (in billions of dollars) in NORTH AMERICA is down 21%

Average Assets (in billions of dollars) in EMEA is down 34%

Average Assets (in billions of dollars) in LATIN AMERICA down 15%

Average Assets (in billions of dollars) in Asia down 17%

Assets Under Custody (EOP in trillions) = $10.3
Trillion which is down 20% YOY (what’s 20% of 10 trillion… anyone??? )

Pandit said in a statement Friday that he was “pleased” with Citigroup’s performance

Then I got really friggn bored of looking at this garbage and now will jump over to my instant Citi valuation calculator, which is patent pending, so piss off and don’t ask:

Ok, so C is selling $3.24 with EPS of -(5.59) and they intend to pay a div yield of 1.40% and they suggest they will somehow make $21.30 Billion by next Qtr…. and they have about $200+ Billion to find ….

So, Everything they touch is garbage — they are in a very deep dark hole and they are floating along on tax payer revenue. This toxic shit is something that wall street wants to push as an investment …….but to who? I imagine either tax payers, retards or pension funds…

While Citigroup posted first-quarter net income of $1.6 billion last week, the New York-based bank suffered an “underlying” loss of 38 cents a share, Richard Ramsden, a Goldman Sachs analyst, wrote in a research note dated yesterday. He repeated a “sell” rating on the stock.

Citigroup’s institutional clients group, which includes investment banking, swung to a $2.83 billion profit from a year-earlier loss, helped by strong results from fixed-income trading.

Citigroup, which received $45 billion in government aid, ended a five-quarter losing streak on trading gains and an accounting benefit for companies in distress. The bank, which cut compensation costs and took fewer writedowns, still reported higher delinquencies on home and credit-card loans.

In early March, Citigroup stock hit an all-time low of 97 cents per share. It has since quadrupled, but remains down 40 percent for 2009. And at $4.01 a share Thursday, Citigroup stock was down 93 percent from its late 2006 peak.

Since late 2007, Citigroup has gotten a new CEO, a new chairman, and a new structure that splits its traditional retail and investment banking business from its consumer finance units, asset management, and risky mortgage-related assets. It’s also been downsizing by selling off businesses and laying off a fifth of its employees. And it’s gotten $45 billion in government funding and a federal backstop on roughly $300 billion in assets.

No system gets this corrupt naturally, and even then not overnight. Institutionalized cronyism cascading into the panic of devastating losses makes people excrete crazy bricks, which are then stacked in a tower of irrationality mortared together with spit and denial. Such edifices do not stand over long. I’m not sure that I think that the _point_ of the stress test was to drive out smaller survivable banks—but the point of the tests was to animate a stonedead lie, that the Big Boys are healthy, when in fact they are dead. Once a lie like that starts, it can be twisted to ever grimmer ends.

Ask yourself a question: Who is running the Bank bailout, the government or the banks? Look at the facts on the ground and on the ledger; it’s the banks, stupid. And there just is not enough money to go around for all of them, so, *cough* some of them have to go. It’s not personal, it’s business. The government may not have had it as a goal to kill the healthiest but least connected banks, but it is easy to look at zombie maws like JPM and GS and see such hearts of blackness in their treasured chests. And since _the banks_ are clearly, effectively in charge of where this is all going . . . .

“Come what come may,
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.”

- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

This is really going to come back and bite the US. They are getting rid of the seed corn.

This favoritism may go much further than toxic asset valuations or toxic asset purchases. The same may hold true for the cash treasuries market. Over the past several weeks the relatively new 7 yr cash has appreciated considerably. In fact, by our estimation it was overpriced by more than 20 ticks (based on several calculations).

In the market, over these past several weeks a large player has been in the open cash markets buying up every on the run seven year in sight to the point where it drove its price beyond what it rationally should have been. In the latest QE purchases the FED has bot roughly 2 billion dollars of the 7 year cash, paying roughly an entire point what we estimated its worth to be! This large entity(ies) made roughly 20 million dollars on these 7 yr notes.

Now I am no conspiracy theorist, but these seems far too coincidental to occur.

As follows:

1. Big player gobbles up 7 yr cash significantly mispricing it over several weeks. They continued to purchase as it was 10 ticks, 20 ticks, even ~25 ticks overpriced. Why would someone do that?

2. FED buys 2 billion far overpriced 7 yr cash in latest QE repurchases

While this does not necessarily mean this was orchestrated to benefit this large party; it is a very unusual event to say the least.

Thoughts?