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...question of the week. Just a few months after the near meltdown of the financial system, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs all reported billion-dollar-plus profits for the quarter ending March 31. Wells Fargo, which won't be releasing its earnings numbers until next week, preannounced on April 9 that it made about $3 billion - a record for the firm. (See pictures of the dangers of printing money...
...what does that actually mean, dumbed down? Whitney's question was specifically about Citi's $1.7 billion in investment-banking profits in Europe, and Kelly's eventual answer was basically just that business had been good. But bank financial statements are never that simple: Citi's overall investment-banking earnings were boosted by a $2.5 billion derivatives valuation adjustment "mainly due to the widening of Citi's CDS spreads." In somewhat dumbed-down but still utterly flummoxing language: credit-default swap (CDS) spreads represent the cost of insuring against Citi's default. That cost went up in the quarter...
...upshot is that, while the quarter was Citi's best since mid-2007, it's awfully hard to say what it signifies. The chances that the bank might eventually be able to earn its way out of its troubles without more taxpayer help seem to have increased. But it will take many more quarters before anybody can say that with confidence...
...What will happen at this point is that bank stocks will not go up much more, but they will not dive sharply down either. There is enough evidence in comments from the CEOs of Citi and B of A and in the Wells Fargo earnings to show that the idea that banks are insolvent and probably in need of nationalization is no longer part of the consideration of how the problems with the system will be settled...
...most powerful argument that bank experts make about why Citi is not valued correctly is that, first, no one has access to its books, and second, the bank has so many levels of debt and equity that no one can unravel what the convertible preferred and senior notes are worth, let alone the common stock. That point of view leaves out the most obvious aspect of valuing Citi's stock which is that it is followed by thousands of experts. Cit trades over 400 million shares a day. With that much volume and that many experts, the market for evaluating...