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...reason Citi stock is higher is simply that the market thinks that most of the trouble at the bank is over. That may not be true at all, but traders are gamblers and they going are "all in" on Citi. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...global stock markets collapsing and credit markets frozen, Geithner, then head of the New York Fed, and Bernanke believed AIG was too close to collapse to do anything other than stop the bleeding. Failure by AIG to pay might have threatened its counterparties - for instance, Citigroup and, in turn, Citi's counterparties. A bond or a derivative is, after all, a promise to pay someone, and if there is no confidence in its fulfillment, the financial system ceases to function. It is not a fear that has gone away simply because AIG has been stabilized...
...Even if Citi is not facing more risk in its portfolio of potentially toxic assets, there are plenty of other landmines facing the firm and the market seems to be ignoring them...
...hundred billion dollars into buying up debt to help bring down interest rates. Nearly $300 billion of that will go to buying longer term Treasuries. If that causes interest rates to fall, it will help people who borrow money in the future, but may not do very much for Citi's clients who borrowed money over the last two years. Many of those clients are tapped out, and the big bank faces hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of dollars in write-down of consumer loans. That does not take into account the amounts that will be lost as commercial mortgages...
Perhaps the most important part of any analysis of Citi's future is that it is not out of the "toxic paper" woods, as much as Mr. Vikram Pandit, the company's CEO would have people think. According to Bloomberg, the IMF predicts that losses from U.S. loans and securitized assets will reach $2.2 billion. Only about half of that amount has been written off on bank balance sheets, and over the 60 days since the agency put out the figure, it has not been revised. (See pictures of the Top 10 scared traders...