Maybe my experience with CitiFinancial will help congress get a better idea of how these people do business.

I have a mortgage with CitiFinancial. It runs behind on a pretty regular basis. They just REFUSED my latest payment. Third time this office has done this over the duration of our loan with them. They sent my check back to me with the word REFUSED writtin across it in RED ink, along with a letter saying they will not accept my check.

In each instance where this company has refused my payment, it’s made my account past due more than 60 days.

Credit rating is already bad these days. Their refusal of my payments makes it APPEAR even worse.

Though I might send their letter and a copy of the refused check to my congressman.

Un freakin believable – they don’t even know the value of their guarantee, this is more like a MOU than a real contract.

The current market value for illiquid assets, sweet. Is it under 10% like Iceland and Lehman or more based on what?

How is this risk being valued by Treasury, FED & FDIC, ummm maybe about zero? Paulson didn’t want to go back to Congress to get authorization of the second $350B so he “guarantees” toxic assets at zero cost rather than purchase them to avoid oversight, hmmmm? Pretty clever.

The values of the underlying mortgages and loans keep dropping so when CITI is forced to recognize new , lower marks after their year-end audit then treasury suddenly has another $50-100 billion liability after Paulson has left?

I thought CITI would last a quarter before they came back for more TARPbucks but I was overly optimistic. This $300B is just the worst tranche of CITIs bad loans of course and with the economy tanking there’s no reason to believe they won’t want the US to continue picking up 90% of their bad debts, and they aren’t the only big bank in this situation so Paulson can continue to “guarantee” their liabilites at no cost til he & Bush leave town.

I’ll know we’ve hit bottom when talking-head financial shows and home-flipping shows no longer grace the airwaves–a side benefit to this contraction will hopefully be an end to the notion that anyone really knows what the hell drives markets in the near term. They don’t. Warren Buffett, supposedly the smartest financier on the planet, has lost about 30% lately w/ Berkshire Hathaway. If he doesn’t know, who does?

For everyone that thinks Citi’s failure would have been catastrophic–remember this–insolvency doesn’t disappear because of government backing. It just transfers the losses to a new, larger entity (the US gov) that is presumably better able to absorb them. But the US gov is not infinite. It is funded by the US taxpayer. The question to ask is whether giving $306 billion to Citi enhances or impairs the welfare of the US taxpayer. Then ask, can we do this for every failing enterprise? Is the US taxpayer that rich? Is his back that strong? We’ll see.

Deflation will soon turn to hyper-inflation. And that’s simply a mathematical exercise. The aggregate dollar supply should represent the value of the goods and services our economy produces. Keep printing them with abandon, and eventually, even with decreasing velocity, we’ll far exceed the amount necessary for a stable pricing signal. Oil’s up 5% today alone. When foreign governments are forced at the point of a nuclear-tipped warhead to accept dollars as payment for oil, then we’ll have pretty much bottomed out.

November 24th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Mannwich @ 11:09.

“Does anyone else notice the blatant rank hypocrisy by CNBC when it comes to bailing out Wall Street…”

There’s another point to be made here also. These guys on CNBC just LOVE the idea of forcing the taxpayers to bail out banks. At the same time, they’re always railing against those who want to raise taxes on the wealthiest 2%.

I see a disconnect here.

@DL: I see the disconnect as well, as I’m sure does the new president-elect, which is why taxes are going to be raised at some point on this group one way or another. Probably not going to happen next year or even the year after but it will happen sometime in his first term.

Yep, that’s what I’ve been doing. I just figure it would be more convenient for everyone if it defaulted to opening in a new tab. You need two hands to perform that function on a macbook pro.

A downpayment, maybe.