Monday, January 14, 2008

Ouch

Citigroup is going to write down another $24B and raise another $15B from mostly foreign sources? Wow. Mortgage mess just keeps getting worse. This is why I thought acquiring Countrywide was so dumb for BofA. There will be more of these massive write downs too.

My favorite line from the article:
"By raising so much captial (their typo), Citigroup CEO Vikram S. Pandit is hoping layoffs can be kept to a minimum."

Now, the line is not attributed to anyone directly but it's laughable. This company doesn't care about saving jobs. They're using that line as air cover so they aren't criticized for accepting so much foreign investment. Remember how everyone flipped out when foreign investors were going to own the ports? Well, how do you think people are going to react about these same investors owning a very material portion of the largest financial institution in the U.S?