http://www.minyanville.com/articles/C-bank-jpm-bac-wfc-bailout/index/a/21280

Since CitiBank has a market valuation of pocket change, why doesn’t BoA make a tender offer. It could take control for pocket change, figuratively speaking.

BoA maintains C as a separate corporate entity upon the close of the deal.

BoA puts C into liquidation bankruptcy and cherry picks the good assets. The rest goes out for sale. In fact, BOA could probably sell the whole thing at a profit if properly dismantled without filing for bankruptcy. This will only work if C is priced next to zero, as it is now.

BoA probably will make money on the deal plus have some decent assets left over, such as retail banking, and 1 pile of crap is taken out of the economy.

Where’s Rubin on that list? When you say exceptional… how exactly do you mean exceptional? Exceptionally blind? Exceptionally incompetent?
I like Bair and have no reason to believe she’s bought and paid for or incompetent. She’s certainly held her own here… But Geithner and Summers??? Come on! Geithner was the fool who was supposed to be regulating these institutions at the FRBNY so that we didn’t end up with a financial meltdown. How’d that work out? How about Summers who was the Treasury Secretary that pushed through all the necessary legislation (ex. Financial Services Modernization Act & Commodities Futures Modernization Act) that made this fantastic meltdown possible in the first place. That IS exceptional.
Quite frankly Otto, I’m tired of hearing your assertions with no backup whatsoever. You call them exceptional, but provide no proof. You say nationalization (let’s just call it receivership or bridge bank… whatever) has downsides but fail to point them out saying there’s no silver bullet. Great rhetoric but not a substantive argument.
I think we can all agree that there’s no silver bullet, all most of us are looking for is the least suboptimal solution to the problem (defined as one that assigns the most losses to those that are the most responsible and the least losses to those that are the least responsible). Clearly, I think that nationalization is the one on the table that comes closest to this ideal.

And those against never see any upside. Such as post-autopsy, the spun off entities would be the most transparent thing going and could actually attract capital from investors. Until there is transparency, the capital will continue to wait it out and the government will be the only investor. That sounds like nationalization for the stoner-slacker crowd, not a serious solution.

At least come up with *some* alternative for these guys other than indefinite status as the ultimate welfare queens.

Here, I’ll toss you a non-nationalization idea: force the big banks to start cutting themselves up in to chunks small enough to fail, by whatever dividing lines they want: geographic, niche markets, whatever. I think everyone agrees they are too big. The dissolving process itself will perhaps create enough transparency to attract investors. Who knows. Could happen. But something has to happen. The status quo is idiotic.

ol’ gov,

I was, in fact, thinking of giving up commas for Lent–we’ll see how that goes..

Say hello to your future Zombie banks that will drip fed a steady IV of Fed billions till we can’t generate money anymore.