Word: bankses
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The raging debate about the largest American banks is whether their stock market values should be zero. Economist Nouriel Roubini, the most highly paid pessimist in the world, recently said that U.S. banks are "insolvent" and credit crisis write-downs will total $3.6 trillion. That is a great deal more...
Americans can also look at the choices made by the U.K. to salvage its credit system. Large banks there are being effectively bought out by the government as the U.K. attempts to put a firewall around huge losses from toxic assets. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is already 70...
U.S. banks do have one last and very large asset: their names. Marketers used to call this brand equity. It was a nonsensical way of saying that having a company's name on hundreds of buildings and sports stadiums made customers more comfortable being customers. Decades of advertising did that...
Who would like to own the Citigroup name? It could probably be auctioned off to a lot of healthy local banks. It might even find a buyer in Asia or the Middle East, until, that is, their banks start to fail, too.
You know the rest of that story. Citi is now on life support, owing its continued survival to $45 billion--so far--in federal aid. Its beleaguered top-management team is trying to undo most of the 1998 merger with Travelers. And the new Obama Administration is faced with the...