Why Citigroup was bailed out???

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Federal government agreed to rescue Citigroup by helping to absorb potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in losses on toxic assets on its balance sheet and injecting fresh capital into the troubled financial giant.
  • Citigroup by the numbers: (WSJ Nov 24) 
  • Total Assets: $2.05 trillion
    Off-balance sheet assets: $1.23 trillion (of which $667 billion in mortgage-related securities);
    Market Cap: $20.5 billion
    Q3 2008 Revenue: $16.68 billion
    Dividend Yield: 10%
    Share Price: $3.76  
  • Dangers of a Citigroup Failure: The failure of a single major financial institution could result in losses to the OTC derivatives market of $300-$400 billion, a new working paper finds. What’s more, since such a failure would likely cause cascading failures of other institutions, the total global financial system losses could exceed $1,500 billion (Singh/Segoviano -IMF)
  • Background
  • WSJ: As share price fell, Citigroup’s credit-default swaps, a measure of insurance against debt default, rose to reflect a cost of $470,000 to insure $10 million in bonds against default for five years
  • Nov 19:  Citi agreed to acquire a further $17.4 billion of assets held by structured investment vehicles advised by the company. Citi was forced to bail out seven troubled SIVs in December, assuming $58 billion of debt out of a total $87bn, as a slump in credit markets eroded the value of their assets 
  •  Fitch, Nov 6: Citigroup has indicated that Citi-branded net credit card chargeoffs could exceed their 1992 peak of 6.44% in coming quarters, particularly if the unemployment rate remains under pressure
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