Saving Citigroup – The Feverish Weekend
Another titan nearly bit the dust last week the way so many others have. It’s stock closed at $3.77 Friday, leaving this financial Frankenstein monster worth a mere $20.5 Billion – chump change compared to its $244 Billion value a couple of years ago before things went so nuts.
Regulators, including Timothy F. Geithner, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the new Treasury Secretary appointee, wrestled all weekend in boardrooms with Citi’s Top Brass, like Robert E. Rubin, the former Treasury secretary (and an economic adviser in the Obama Transition Team) and an influential executive and director at Citigroup, and Vikram S. Pandit, Citigroup’s chief executive. What emerged was another bold Bail Out Plan involving US government backing of some $306 billion in loans and securities and a direct investment of $20 billion in the company, to add to the US government’s already diversified porfolio. Good night Free Market Capitalism, Rest In Peace.
Does this staggering behemoth deserve another $326 Billion of your and my tax dollars on top of the amounts totaling now in the trillions as the Fed acts like the great lifeguard of the financial rip tide, racing back, again and again, into the crashing waves to save, not some foundering child, but, like Citi, some enormous white whale in its death throes in the pounding surf?
Small Business to Become a Political Force?
Can small businesses band together to influence policy that relates to their interests? That optimistic hope floated in the air at the first Governor’s Conference on Small Business and Entrepreneurship in Los Angeles last week.
The two day conference led by the state’s Small Business Advocate, Marty Keller, focused on issues important to the small business community.
Listening to experts on business and the need to create an entrepreneurial state, attendees considered a number of areas to improve small business in the state.
The ten issues addressed by the conference were: Concerns over the AB-32 greenhouse gases law; Access to Capital; Entrepreneurial Encouragement; Health Care; Innovation and Technology; Procurement (for small business wanting to do business with the state); Regulatory Reform; Transportation; Taxation; and Workforce Development.
Hey, academics and sports can mix!
Florida State isn’t the football powerhouse it used to be, but the story of its star safety Myron Rolle is an inspiration. Yesterday, the 3.75 CGP pre-med major, who graduated in just two and a half years, earned a Rhodes Scholarship.
Rolle arrived at Florida State as one of the nation’s top recruits. I am jealous that UCLA, which has a tradition of producing All-Americans at that position, did not land him. Rolle, who moonlights doing cancer research while aspiring to be a neurosurgeon, is a role model in every sense of the term.
However, I think his defensive coordinator should be fired and banned from coaching for his comment last year criticizing him for letting school interfere with his football. What a jackass!
While Florida State has recently dismissed several key players from the team for poor academic performance and suspended others for participating in a lunchroom brawl, Rolle is tutoring kids from the Seminole tribe reservation and studying to be a doctor, a profession this world need more people to pursue.