Citigroup Failed to Pass the Stress Tests

[unhappycamper]

http://watchingamerica.com/News/235952/citigroup-failed-to-pass-the-stress-tests/

Citigroup Failed to Pass the Stress Tests
Le Monde, France
By Stéphane Lauer
Translated By Michael Krimian
27 March 2014
Edited by Gillian Palmer

That is what one calls a slap. Amid the series of stress tests the Federal Reserve runs on the big American banks, on March 26, five of them have been judged too feeble to allow themselves to increase their dividends and proceed to buy their own shares.

Citigroup, the third largest bank in terms of assets, is among the bad bunch, along with three big foreign bank branches — the British HSBC and RBS, and the Spanish Santander. Zions Bancorporation, a small bank in Utah, is also part of the blacklist.

Severe Scenarios

About 30 establishments have been subjected by the Fed to a series of financial crisis scenarios to test their soundness. These measures follow the Dodd-Frank law on Wall Street reform. This legislation was implemented after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008, in order to avoid using public funds once again to keep the financial sphere afloat.

Only the most important banks, with more than $50 billion of assets in the United States, are concerned, that is to say, the entities considered "too big to fail," and whose demise endangers the financial system.

[Demeter]

1. CITIBANK: Dead since....2008

I wanted to illustrate with a zombie image...but frankly, they are too gruesome.

And reports of Citi's insolvency predate 2008...this is just the latest relapse in the game.

February 13, 2009
Where Citi Is, Trouble Soon Follows
Posted by James Surowiecki

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/jamessurowiecki/2009/02/where-citi-is-t.html

As I argued in my last post, we need to be careful about extrapolating from history, particularly when the historical record is short. That’s one reason why I’m not convinced that nationalizing most of our major banks is the best solution to our current financial problems. But I will say that if the recent history of our financial system tells us anything, it’s that it’s a miracle (and not in the good sense) that at least one bank—Citigroup—hasn’t already been taken over. This is a bank that was, by most accounts, technically insolvent in the early nineteen-eighties, as a result of the Latin American debt crisis. It was in serious trouble again in the early nineteen-nineties—Congressman John Dingell actually gave a speech in 1991 saying it was insolvent. And it’s been a major player in, and cause of, our current financial crisis, with a chorus of analysts declaring that, once again, its liabilities are greater than its assets. It does make you wonder how many lives it has, and it also makes you wonder why, after its earlier woes, regulators ever allowed it to get this big.

[Demeter]

3. Um, okay....it's your thread, after all

You can put what you want.