Citi

  • 16 Oct 2012 at 6:57 PM
  • Banks

Citi Is Pretty Proud Of How It Handled Abruptly Sort-Of Firing Its CEO The Day After Earnings

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There’s a thing called “corporate governance” which you might think means like “the practice of running a corporation in a good way instead of a bad way” but you would be wrong. You can tell because the consensus is that Citi has displayed good corporate governance by making a chaotic demoralizing mess of firing Vikram Pandit in disgrace and/or regretfully accepting his voluntary resignation and/or other. Here’s Felix Salmon:

The CEO’s job is to run the bank, to answer to the board, and to get fired if he doesn’t perform. Which is what seems to have happened with Pandit.

Meanwhile, further downtown, the exact opposite is happening. Where Citi’s powerful board acted decisively after yet another set of weak results, Goldman’s powerless board is simply sitting back and watching their bank report a much more solid set of earnings …

[W]hile investors care about earnings first and foremost, they also want to know that they’ll ultimately receive those earnings, rather than just seeing them disappear into the pockets of management, or be wasted on silly acquisitions. Governance matters. And on that front, if on few others, Citi can credibly claim to be leagues ahead of Goldman.

I say unto you that one or the other of these statements can be true, but not both:

  • “Governance matters.”
  • “on that front, if on few others, Citi can credibly claim to be leagues ahead of Goldman.”

Read more »

  • 15 Oct 2012 at 2:10 PM
  • Banks

Citi Has An Excellent 88% Decrease In Profit

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I don’t have much insight into Citi’s earnings but I do enjoy the reporting of them. When a car or Facebook company reports earnings you basically ask questions like “how many cars or Facebooks did it sell?” and “how much money did it make on each one?” and those questions are kind of answerable and their answers give you a sense of how you should feel in your heart about the company. When a bank – like, a bank bank – reports earnings you can ask “how many mortgages did it sell?” and “how much money did it make on each one?” and those answers will be useful to you too, though there will be murky liquidity and valuation overhangs that will reduce their usefulness.

If you asked those questions of Citi, you might or might not get answers that might or might not be useful, but you’d be hard pressed to translate them into the headlines on Citi’s earnings. Big banks are not primarily engines for selling products and collecting a margin on them; they are bundles of accounting decisions, and this is never more apparent than at earnings time. This is pretty far removed from economic activity in the world:

Citigroup Inc.’s third-quarter profit fell 88% as the bank took charges tied to the value of its debt and the sale of a stake in its brokerage joint venture …

Others chose to emphasize economic activity in the world, at the cost of, y’know, GAAP: Read more »

  • 21 Sep 2012 at 5:25 PM
  • Banks

Morgan Stanley Doesn’t Want To Share Custody Of Smith Barney Any More

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Buried in a footnote1 a while back I ruminated on the fact that, in the deal where Morgan Stanley bought a chunk of its Morgan Stanley Smith Barney brokerage JV from Citigroup, Morgan Stanley got a sort-of-free option to buy the rest of Smith Barney, and how that option is (1) valuable and (2) sort of cheap funding. That was basically all wrong, sorry! The lesson is, never read footnotes.

Charlie Gasparino is reporting that “Morgan Stanley chief James Gorman is making a full-court press with regulators to expedite the purchase of the remaining piece of the Smith Barney brokerage firm from Citigroup, moving up the buyout date as much as two years ahead of schedule,” so I guess Gorman puts the time value of that option at zero or less. As for cheap funding, Goldman had a research note this week saying that they met with Morgan Stanley and heard the same story, and also that:

At the margin, full MSSB ownership should have a meaningful impact on ROE as: 1) MS is still paying Citigroup a portion of earnings from the JV despite holding capital to support the entire business, 2) synergies with the Institutional Securities business will grow (i.e. client flow routing), and 3) the funding profile and client product offering mix will improve.

I think the second two things say something like “Citi won’t appreciate us shoving all of our MSSB customers into high-margin Morgan Stanley products, so we have to get rid of them before doing that,” though you could read them otherwise. The first thing calls the cheap-funding argument into some doubt, though maybe not that much doubt; Morgan Stanley’s capital is by some metrics cheaper than Citi’s, while its (credit market) funding is more expensive, so maybe this is still a good deal.

Anyway here’s what Gasparino has to say about the delay: Read more »

  • 29 Aug 2012 at 6:31 PM

Citi Pays $590mm To Settle Lawsuit Over Not Selling Crappy Mortgage Bonds

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Citi settled a CDO case for $590 million today, and if you are following along at home you’ll note that that is more than 2x as much as it settled its last CDO case for. There are a number of reasons for that but a big one is: in this case, Citi is in trouble for buying the CDOs, whereas in the last one it was in trouble for selling them. You can’t win, of course, but you can minimize your losses, and the method is clear: next time you find yourself with billions of dollars of assets that you’ve got marked at par but that you’re pretty sure will quickly decay into a pool of oozing crap, you should sell them quickly and deceptively. You’ll get sued less.

Also you won’t lose billions of dollars on the actual CDOs, which is arguably better.

I kid I kid this is different and Citi will probably be whacked repeatedly and in creative ways by shareholders over the fraudulent selling of the CDOs – that $285mm it’s paying to the SEC is really just a down payment – so there really is no way to win (except to accurately mark your assets and disclose your exposure clearly and accurately but who would do that?). Like: CDO investors will sue over the fact that Citi sold them crappy CDOs. Citi shareholders will sue over the fact that Citi was going around selling crappy CDOs without disclosing in its 10Q “we are in the business of selling crappy CDOs.” The advanced move will be when people sue because Citi didn’t tell them that other people were going to sue it, which sounds very silly until you remember that that exact thing is happening to BofA right now. Read more »

  • 31 Jul 2012 at 5:29 PM

Federal Jury Doesn’t Want SEC To Take This The Wrong Way, But It Thinks This Citi CDO Case Is Bullshit

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So remember when Citi did that thing that was all the rage in 2007 where they constructed a synthetic CDO referencing mortgage-backed securities in order to facilitate their own prop bet against those MBS, but then maybe inadequately disclosed to investors that they were in fact naked short those MBS? And then they got sued by the SEC for fraud, and settled that case for $285mm, or tried to anyway*? Well the SEC also sued one Brian Stoker, the Citi VP who structured that deal, because it’s important for the SEC to pursue powerful individuals responsible for financial crisis wrongdoing and who could be more powerful than the vice president of Citigroup? And unlike Citi, Brian Stoker chose to roll the dice, and today he won big but with an asterisk:

A jury on Tuesday cleared a former Citigroup executive of wrongdoing connected to the bank’s sale of risky mortgage-related investments at the peak of the housing boom, dealing a blow to the government’s effort to hold Wall Street executives accountable for their conduct during the financial crisis.

In addition to handing up its verdict, the federal jury also issued an unusual statement addressed to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the government agency that brought the civil case.

“This verdict should not deter the S.E.C. from investigating the financial industry and current regulations and modify existing regulations as necessary,” said the statement, which was read aloud in the courtroom by Judge Jed S. Rakoff, who presided over the trial.

Thanks jury! Bringing lawsuits about mortgage CDO marketing practices has been the major focus of the SEC’s response to the financial crisis,** and this was the first time that approach was tested in court, and the SEC’s lawyers spent building the case only to see a jury shoot them down in two days, and they have no courtroom victory or precedent to show for their work, but they won the one thing that is truly important in this vale of tears: an encouraging note from a group of anonymous strangers. Read more »

  • 31 May 2012 at 12:26 PM
  • Banks

Morgan Stanley Will Soon Not Share Its Research Estimates With 14% More Retail Customers

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Morgan Stanley has announced that it will be buying 14% of its Morgan Stanley Smith Barney joint venture from Citi in a sort of glacially negotiated way. MS currently owns 51% of MSSB (plus $5.5bn of preferred interests), and Citi owns the other 49% (plus $2bn of preferred). You can read how they’re going to figure out the price here. Basically they each hire an advisor to value MSSB like a public company, and then get together and see how close they are. If they’re within 10% of each other, they average their prices; if not, they hire a third advisor to figure out who got closer to the right answer. Don’t get too excited about pitching to be one of those advisors, though, at least not in the first round:

Morgan Stanley and Citigroup each will engage one investment bank or financial advisory firm of national standing and with experience in the valuation of securities of financial services companies (an “Appraiser”) for purposes of estimating FMV. All fees and disbursements of the first two Appraisers shall be the responsibility of the party that engaged such Appraiser. Either or both of the first two Appraisers may be an affiliate of the party engaging such Appraiser, and Morgan Stanley has engaged Morgan Stanley Investment Banking as its Appraiser.

MSSB’s net income was about $300mm last year*, and recent Morgan Stanley Investment Banking valuation precedents suggest about a 100x P/E, so I’ll go ahead and predict we’ll see a $30bn-ish valuation from them, no? (Too easy? Actually, ha, it’s not that wildly off; press reports suggest a $15bn bid from MS and a $23bn offer from Citi.) Here’s how they’ll do their math: Read more »

  • 04 May 2012 at 6:39 PM

Let’s Worry About Bank of America’s Collateral Triggers

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I occasionally entertain myself thinking about this set of puzzles:
(1) It is good for financial regulators and probably, let’s say, the world, if creditors are slow to pull money out of banks that run into trouble. In particular you don’t want everyone to want to move first and get their money out well before there’s a problem, because them getting their money out creates, or let’s say at least exacerbates, the problem.
(2) Banks also want that, since going bankrupt for no reason seems sort of harsh.
(3) But creditors want their money back – and being first out the door is a good way to ensure that that happens.

And since, when things go pear-shaped, there’s always some risk either that the rules won’t let the creditors move as fast as they want, or that the rules will change, it’s good to get your money out before there’s a problem. The best way to do that is just to keep your money to begin with, or only to give it to people who won’t get into trouble, but failing that, you want to get your money back when there’s a hint of trouble but things are still mostly fine. For some reason credit ratings used to indicate that state, since they worked so well last time, so a downgrade from nice investment grade to less-nice-but-still-investment-grade is a good time to check in with your money and see if it might miss you and want to spend a bit more time with you.

On the other hand, if you are a bank and you agree to terminate or collateralize lots of contracts upon a downgrade, you tend to have to come up with lots of cash at exactly the wrong time. So it is probably smart practice to mostly not agree to that sort of thing. But life being what it is you can’t win them all, so you agree to have some trigger-on-downgrade collateralization in some of your contracts, and you just push for those triggers to be as few and as far away from your current ratings as possible.

Anyway, let’s check in with some counterparties’ money: Read more »

  • 16 Apr 2012 at 3:47 PM
  • Banks

Nice Earnings, Citi, Shame About Your Credit Improvement

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I have nothing particularly useful to tell you about Citi’s earnings – they were good, yay, well done Vik, one day maybe you’ll be able to pay a dividend – so let me ask you some useless things. My favorite useless thing is DVA, which is the thing where if you are a bank you “lose” “money” when your credit improves and you “make” “money” when your credit gets worse, which is in some ways the opposite of right though also not, like, totally away from reality. Citi suffered thereby for its virtue:

Citigroup reported improved first-quarter earnings on Monday, with steady growth in the bank’s globe-spanning consumer businesses and a rebound in investment banking from a poor previous quarter.

Net income was $3.4bn in the first quarter compared with $3.2bn a year earlier as revenue grew just 1 per cent to $20.2bn. Those measures exclude the impact of so-called “debt valuation adjustments” – an accounting rule that makes companies take gains or losses from swings in the price of their own debt. On a reported basis, including DVA, Citi’s net earnings were down at $2.9bn.

So three useless thoughts/questions for you on that:

(1) WTF guys: Read more »

  • 15 Mar 2012 at 7:27 PM

Appellate Court Willing to Entertain the Possibility that Citi Was Not Committing Fraud

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I’ve had some fun these last few days proposing counterintuitive theories for why Citi might not suck as much as you probably think it does and it’s nice to see others joining in the pastime, even if this sounds a little far-fetched:

The district court’s logic appears to overlook the possibilities (i) that Citigroup might well not consent to settle on a basis that requires it to admit liability, (ii) that the S.E.C. might fail to win a judgment at trial, and (iii) that Citigroup perhaps did not mislead investors.

That piece of rank conjecture is from the Second Circuit’s opinion on an appeal* of Judge Rakoff’s rejection of the settlement between the SEC and Citi over some mortgage-backed securities. Here’s DealBook: Read more »

  • 15 Mar 2012 at 4:06 PM
  • Banks

BofA’s Success Looks a Bit Worse Than Citi’s Failure

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We’ve talked about the fact that Citi “failed” the Fed’s stress tests in the sense that its plan to return capital was Too Big, and so it got whacked by markets. Bank of America passed with flying colors, so, tiny yaaaaay, but the Journal puts that in context:

The situation at Citigroup [what with the failing and such] was reminiscent of a similar setback suffered last year by Bank of America Corp. when the Fed denied its request for a dividend increase. CEO Brian Moynihan had earlier hinted raising the dividend was likely. This time around, Bank of America didn’t seek a increase of its quarterly dividend, currently one penny.

In fact! BofA seems to have some capital raising in mind:

I’m not going to like do math or anything crazy, but assuming that, but for their optimism/pessimism around capital return/raising, Citi and BofA are exactly the same, what could possibly go wrong, 20bps is $2bn of new capital, which I’m going to guess comes from BofA paying its cash bonuses in things other than cash?* Read more »

  • 13 Mar 2012 at 6:51 PM
  • Banks

Citi Will Try The Stress Test Again With A $9bn Stock Buyback

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More stress tests, bleargh. I guess the news is that Citi “failed”, though I can’t get all that excited by that because it didn’t exactly “fail” in the sense of now it’s being forced to raise capital / broken up / burned to the ground. Instead it failed assuming it follows the capital plan it submitted to the Fed, which is clearly a capital-lowering rather than capital-raising plan. I ballpark it at $10bn of share repurchases and dividends,* which is … well, it’s pretty big for Citi. So they can just not do that then. Or not do quite as much of that, which seems to be their plan:

In light of the Federal Reserve’s actions, Citi will submit a revised Capital Plan to the Federal Reserve later this year, as required by the applicable regulations. The Federal Reserve advised Citi that it has no objection to our continuing the existing dividend levels on our preferred stock and our common stock, and we plan to do so, subject to approval by the Board of Directors each quarter. The Federal Reserve also advised that it has no objection to Citi redeeming certain series of outstanding trust preferred securities, as Citi proposed in its Capital Plan.

We plan to engage further with the Federal Reserve to understand their new stress loss models. We strongly encourage the public release of these models and the associated benchmarks and assumptions. We believe greater transparency in this process will best serve all banking institutions and their shareholders as well as the international regulatory community and market participants, and will encourage a level playing field globally.

There are at least two ha! moments in that snotty last paragraph. First there’s the fact that the Fed had planned to release the stress test results on Thursday and got gun-jumped by Jamie Dimon. So much for Fed transparency. But also, specifically, as people are all running around suing each other about the Fed maybe kind of encouraging bank CEOs to hide material information from investors, it is odd that the Fed would have the stress test results and sit on them for two days. Imagine the scenario where Jamie Dimon, Vikram Pandit, and the Fed all know that JPM passed and was going to do a largeish buyback, while Citi failed and was going to do a … I guess somewhat smaller buyback – and they didn’t tell anyone from today until Thursday. If you sold JPM to buy C today, wouldn’t you be kind of annoyed?** Read more »