Word: city
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bailed-out businesses, the notion that there's a correlation between excessive pay and excessive risk-taking isn't quite accurate. It may be true in the case of hedge funds or leveraged-buyout - which call themselves private-equity (PE) - firms or some parts of stricken outfits like AIG, Citi and the former Merrill Lynch, now part of Bank of America. But hedgies and PEs aren't covered by pay czar Ken Feinberg's ukases...
...biggest basket cases - AIG and Citi - got into trouble not because they took risks; they got into trouble because they didn't know they were taking risks. (See the top 10 financial collapses...
...likes of Citi owned AAA-rated mortgage securities they thought were as safe as Treasury securities. That's what AAA means - or what they thought it meant. But since the rating agencies screwed up royally by not analyzing the securities properly - a whole other story - Citi et al. got whacked...
Where's the Justice? None of the people who presided over the catastrophes at the likes of Citi and AIG and Merrill Lynch are likely to go to jail. That's because incompetence and arrogance aren't criminal offenses. If that seems a bit unfair, so does the government's rescue program that saved some and not others, depending on political and social criteria. The most recent example: Delphi Corp., GM's former parts division that was spun off a decade ago, which recently emerged from bankruptcy proceedings. White collar Delphi retirees are having their pensions whacked, but United Auto...
...fact, much of Hall's ability to produce outsized profits for Citi comes from the creative ways he had found to make money off the oil markets, doing things that would either be impossible for the average small trader or that most traders just won't think of. Earlier this year, for instance, Hall and his traders rented a tanker and filled it with 1 million barrels of oil. Oil prices were down, but most traders thought they were going up again, so futures contracts pegged to distant-month deliveries were expensive. The better deal was the real thing...