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Obama's OMB Pick Lew Headed Citi Unit That Shorted HousingJul 15 2010, 3:40 PM ET Imagine if President Obama's new OMB head had worked at one of the biggest Wall Street bailout recipients and headed a group that profited by shorting the housing market. That would be a public relations nightmare, but it also appears to be the reality the administration faces with the Jacob Lew nomination. His Citigroup unit had a big investment in the hedge fund run by John Paulson, also at the center of the SEC's Goldman Sachs lawsuit. The hedge fund made billions of dollars by...

Extract: Debrahlee Lorenzana is filing a lawsuit against Citibank because they fired her, she says, for the strangest reason: she's too hot. ....Her bosses told her that "as a result of the shape of her figure, such clothes were purportedly 'too distracting' for her male colleagues and supervisors to bear," she says

Wall Street Read of the Week: "Bob Rubin Just Wants to Be Cuddled" By Max Abelson April 30, 2010 | 6:36 p.m Until today, the London Business School-educated Iris Mack was known as a Harvard Management Company whistle-blower. From now on she will be remembered for these extraordinary words about her affair with former Treasury Secretary and Citi executive Bob Rubin: "He got this funny look on his face, and asked: 'Do you want to go upstairs and...cuddle?' So that's what this is about... And not long afterward the former Treasury Secretary had his tongue down my throat and hands...

Former Citi Chair Bob Rubin (ex-Goldman Sachs banker and Clinton Treasury Secy) was criticized by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission for not accepting blame for Citi's ill-advised drive into CDOs (collaterized mortgage-backed securities that got a $45B TARP bailout). "You were not a garden-variety board member," he was told. Rubin got a $115M paycheck sitting on Citi's board 1999-2009; Rubin is frustrated with the view that he should have been more involved in Citi's operations during the crisis.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Robert Rubin, the former financial superstar once lionized for his global crisis-fighting prowess, was scolded Thursday over the mortgage-securities disaster at Citigroup Inc. when he was a top executive there. His claim he didn't know of the risks piling up drew a sharp retort. "You can't have it both ways: You either were pulling the levers or asleep at the switch," the head of the panel investigating the roots of the financial crisis told Rubin at a hearing. Rubin expressed regret. Yet he insisted he didn't know until late in the game, when the subprime mortgage crisis...

Obama administration is preparing to sell its stake in the bank, sources say. Among the banks that rule Wall Street, Citigroup got a bailout that was bigger than the rest. Now the company is about to pay a king's ransom for its federal rescue. The Obama administration is making final preparations to sell its stake in the New York bank, according to industry and federal sources. At today's prices, the sale would net more than $8 billion, by far the largest profit returned from any firm that accepted bailout funds and the transaction would be the second-largest stock sale in...

As the Republican presidential candidate in the fall of 2008, Arizona Sen. John McCain had more power than anyone to upend the Wall Street rescue package. But McCain now feels duped by former Republican Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. “We were all misled,” McCain said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” speaking of Paulson. “What did he do? He started pumping money into the financial institutions. Now the financial institutions are fine — Wall Street’s doing great. Main Street is in deep trouble.” Paulson and other former Bush administration officials told Congress at the time that the $700 billion lawmakers approved...

Citigroup Warns Customers It May Refuse To Allow Withdrawals John Carney Feb. 19, 2010, 2:57 PM The image of banks locking their doors to keep customers from making withdrawals during a bank run is what immediately came to mind when we heard that Citigroup was telling customers it has the right to prevent any withdrawals from checking accounts for seven days. "Effective April 1, 2010, we reserve the right to require (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking accounts. While we do not currently exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past, we...

Questions of the day: Would you buy a round-trip ticket on an airplane prone to crashes? How about a car with a history of serious brake problems? Interested in a TV that works great, except for the picture? If you answered yes to any of those, do I have an investment opportunity for you

Citi plans crisis derivatives Author: Laurie Carver Source: Risk magazine | 08 Feb 2010 Categories: Derivatives Topics: Citi, hedging, liquidity crisis bankrupt Credit specialists at Citi are considering launching the first derivatives intended to pay out in the event of a financial crisis. The firm has drawn up plans for a tradable liquidity index, known as the CLX, on which products could be structured that allow buyers to hedge a spike in funding costs. Like the untraded US rates liquidity index (USRLI), the CLX is constructed as a sum of the Sharpe ratio – deviations from the mean divided by...

Citigroup Inc. became the latest bank to take a cautious view of consumers' credit problems, reporting a $7.77 fourth-quarter loss due to failed loans and the costs of repaying government bailout money. The bank said Tuesday it did see some early signs of improvement in its credit business although it still needed to set aside $8.18 billion to cover unpaid loans. That amount was down 10 percent from the third quarter, and 36 percent from a year earlier. John Gerspach, Citigroup's chief financial officer, reported one of those improving signs during a conference call with the media, noting that the...

<p>The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is probing a computer-security breach targeting Citigroup Inc. (C 3.35, -0.07, -2.05%) that resulted in a theft of tens of millions of dollars by computer hackers, according to a Wall Street Journal report dated Tuesday.</p>

When contacted by the Washington Post to explain the special $38 billion tax deal the government is giving Citigroup, officials at the Department of the Treasury offered this explanation: Treasury officials said the government needed to grant the tax break in order to sell its shares in Citigroup because the company could not afford the loss. Officials also said that preserving the tax break would help the government sell its shares at a higher price. If any other shareholder engaged in this kind of behavior, he'd probably be indicted. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, is rightly planning hearings on this debacle...

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U.S. taxpayers could ultimately see a profit of $13 billion to $14 billion from Citigroup's payback of bailout investments, including dividends paid, a U.S. Treasury official said on Monday. That amount includes the gain on the government's 34 percent stake in Citi common shares , which was close to $5.8 billion as of Friday's close, as well as trust preferred securities with a $5.2 billion face value, received in a loss-sharing agreement backing a pool of Citigroup assets. The official also said the total also includes estimates of nearly $3 billion in dividends paid on the government's investments in the...

No law, including the Credit CARD Act that has started to take effect, prevents banks from closing down credit accounts without warning. Credit card issuers all maintain the right...

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. government's "pay czar" played a critical role in Citigroup's(C.N) decision to sell off its lucrative commodities trading business, Phibro, a source familiar with the matter said Friday. The sale of the unit to Occidental Petroleum Corp (OXY.N) relieves beleaguered Citigroup of a massive political headache-- what to do with Phibro trader Andrew Hall and his paycheck of up to $100 million. Hall has become the poster child of Wall Street's top earners; and while pay czar Kenneth Feinberg would have limited power over his pay this year, he would undoubtedly have dramatically restructured Hall's...

Citi sues Morgan Stanley over CDS, claims $245 mln Sat Sep 26, 2009 3:35am BST NEW YORK, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Citigroup Inc (C.N: Quote, Profile, Research) sued Morgan Stanley (MS.N: Quote, Profile, Research) on Friday for breach of contract, saying the Wall Street firm owed it $245.4 million for protection it bought on a loan. Citibank bought a credit default swap (CDS) from Morgan Stanley & Co International in 2006 on a $366 million revolving credit facility it provided to an issuer of collateralized debt obligations (CDO), according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The...

Regulators today won't define 'systemic risk,' unlike 25 years ago. With Congress back in session and the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers failure upon us, the Obama Administration is resuming its quest for greatly expanded authority to bail out American businesses. Under the Treasury reform blueprint, any financial company, whether a regulated bank or not, could be rescued or seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation if regulators believe it poses a systemic risk. If recent history is any guide, when the feds stage their next intervention, they will not define "systemic risk" and they will refuse to release the...

The head of the committee overseeing how Uncle Sam is spending its bailout dollars offered withering criticism of the feds' handling of Citigroup's rescue, blasting regulators for their lack of transparency -- and the absence of any clear exit strategy. Noting that other companies that have received federal aid have served up proposals to pay back the money, Elizabeth Warren, chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel, had harsh words about the lack of such a plan in the case of Citi, which has received $45 billion in rescue cash and is more than one-third owned by US taxpayers. "Too big...