And for the second time, Citigroup comes begging for money.
The government unveiled a bold plan Sunday to rescue Citigroup, injecting a fresh $20 billion into the troubled firm as well as guaranteeing hundreds of billions of dollars in risky assets.
The action, announced jointly by the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., is aimed at shoring up a huge financial institution whose collapse would wreak havoc on the already crippled financial system and the U.S. economy.
The sweeping plan is geared to stemming a crisis of confidence in the company, whose stock has been hammered in the past week on worries about its financial health.
Critics worry the actions could put billions of taxpayers’ dollars in jeopardy and encourage financial companies to take excessive risk on the belief that the government will bail them out of their messes.
The $20 billion cash injection by the Treasury Department will come from the $700 billion financial bailout package. The capital infusion follows an earlier one — of $25 billion — in Citigroup in which the government also received an ownership stake.
The once mighty Citigroup, which had at one time been the largest U.S. bank by assets, has seen its shares lose 60 percent of their value in the past week, reflecting a crisis of confidence among skittish investors. They are worried all the risky debt on Citigroup’s balance sheet will turn into losses as the economy worsens and the markets stay turbulent — losses that could be nearly impossible to reverse.
Good morning, Chuq! Needless to say, I’m not too thrilled about the prospect of a Citigroup bailout. They were going around making bad investments and then gobbling up smaller banks a few weeks ago, and now they need taxpayer aid? No way!
Regarding the “Political Blog” icon on my site, it’s actually organized by this guy here: http://chenzhen.wordpress.com/2007/05/25/wordpress-political-blogger-alliance/.
I asked him to add me to the WordPress Political Blogger Alliance, and then I dropped the programming code that he provides on that page, onto a text widget on my sidebar.
Others in the blogger alliance can also “ping” your political posts if you add this link “WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance” on the bottom of a post like I did here:
http://culturepress.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/powell-voting-black/ (you can see how that works if you scroll over the link on the bottom of that post of mine–it magically connects you with other posts on the alliance blogroll)
but that “pinging” link can only be added to a new post no more than once per day; otherwise, other bloggers in the alliance will get bombarded by links to your post and no other.
It’s all more complicated than I had hoped. It took me a couple weeks to understand what the hell was going on and how this process worked! The bloggers on the alliance tend to be really hardcore, and a couple them started leaving nasty comments on my site. I defintiely got more hits and more attention when I was using the ping-process, but I was also asking for trouble by inviting all these dicks to my site. I haven’t used the ping-link lately because I don’t have the energy to deal with the negative attention these days!
About the Copyright… actually I don’t have a copyright! I just type in that line in order to (hopefully) dissuade would-be plagiarizers!!! I should really be doing what this guy here does– http://jamesewelch.wordpress.com/ He just has a Creative Commons License logo on the sidebar of his blog. Creative Commons requires no copyright, but it supposedly protects your electronic/intellectual propoerty.
Whoops, too many links on that last comment up there, I think it went to your “spam” folder as a result!
Morning….yep they got 25 million earlier and now it will be about 20 million…..what did they do with the first one? And yes it did go to spam folder
There it is thanx for the info…I appreciate the help.
Oh you’re so very welcome! I hope it does help. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if have any more questions about that stuff! I did just put a little “Creative Commons” license on my blog’s sidebar. I was also just told by an attorney friend that, in the U.S., you don’t actually need to “get” a Copyright for intellectual/written material like this. Adding the word “Copyright” in itself copyrights your work.
I don’t usually put that Copyright line on most of my posts, only when there’s a lot of original or sorta’ original stuff in it. I’ve heard of too many college students go around the interney looking for essays to copy & paste, and turn in as a Poli-Sci paper. That kinda’ stuf! really irks me!!!
Thanx again…I can write pretty good but I am still a novice at the ‘puter stuff…learning as I go.
I learn as I go, too. For someone of my generation, I’m not a techie or gadget-person at all. I didn’t even realize there was such a thing as blogging until about a year ago!!!
P.S. Have a fabulous holiday weekend, by the way! I hope you get to spend some nice quality time with fmaily and good friends…
I hear you….I did not have a ‘puter until about 6 years ago, but I have been writing for many years…..Random Thoughts is a throwback…I take many notes…and the same to you, have a great time with fun, food and family…I will have a day of Zen.