This trend has now reached California, so it's about to become a whole lot more meaningful.

Again, this may be a matter of paperwork, but at minimum, it seems like banks will have to spend time and money straightening out their claims to homes on loans they've securitized.

Barry Ritholtz today usefully repeats a point he made earlier this month in connection with an Andrew Ross Sorkin column about the SEC's proposed settlement with Citigroup and the court's refusal to go along with it.

And that is that shareholders of companies run by corrupt management are supposed to be punished.

To follow up on Steve Taub's blog from the other day, more companies are running into resistance from shareholders to what they see as excessive executive compensation.

True, the latest rebellions are occurring in the UK, but governance practices increasingly know few boundaries, or at least find the pond not much of one.

A time-honored way for unpopular companies to burnish their image is to dole out lots of money to charity. Now it looks like the new alternative, at least for financial services businesses, is to hand out big bucks to small companies.

Just consider this.  On Wednesday, Citigroup announced the launch of a $200 million fund to boost small-business lending in low-income communities.  It linked up with Calvert Foundation, a nonprofit investment management firm,  and Opportunity Financial Network, a financial intermediary for community investments, to help with these efforts.  The deal is that Citi will provide $199 million through a mix of equity and loans. The other two organizations will supply the rest. 

Submitted by Francine McKenna, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

The US Treasury recently decided to vote its proportionate ownership interest in Citigroup to affirm reappointment of KPMG as Citi's auditor for the 41st consecutive year.

Maybe Treasury married KPMG all over again because they're cheap compared to what Goldman and AIG are paying PwC.

Maybe KPMG knows this client best - a dubious honor. KPMG has been on the scene of Citi's crimes and misdemeanors all over the world for 41 years.

Maybe Treasury feels like a mother who puts up with a gold digging daughter-in-law because daughter-in-law saw mom kissing the tennis pro and mom knows her son has slept with the baby-sitter...


From Citigroup's most recent proxy:

Why is John Dugan still Comptroller of the Currency? (Skip to the second-to-last sentence of this item if you can't wait for the answer.) 

Today Dugan had his director of regulatory policy spinning Bloomberg on how tough the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is being on off-balance sheet gizmos known as liquidity puts, which helped all but destroy Citigroup.

I'm far from the only person having a hard time understanding the significance of the deals arranged by a company that this page one New York Times story referred to as Lehman Brothers' "alter ego."

From the looks of it, the company in question, called Hudson Castle, was set up simply to serve in the traditional role of outside investor in another company's off-balance-sheet financing vehicle, which is known as a special purpose or variable interest entity in the accounting world, and a conduit or structured investment vehicle in the world of banks.

Better late than never, I suppose. But Big Bob Rubin has apparently had a change of heart as to the virtues of financial deregulation.

Appearing before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission today with former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince in his capacity as former vice chairman of the bailed out bank, Rubin expressed much different sentiments about the need to prevent banks from becoming too big to fail and derivatives from adding untold amounts of undetectable leverage to the financial system than he did when he was President Clinton's deregulator in chief.

Man, I just caught some of the last part of the financial crisis show this afternoon and I have to say it did very little to clarify who the hell was responsible for Citigroup's near-death experience during the mortgage meltdown, even though the panel had four former Citifolks on it.

Citi's ex co-CEO of markets and banking, Thomas Maheras, for example, testified that the bank was well aware that housing was heading south in late 2007 and was actively managing its balance sheet to deal with that.

The Treasury Department is planning to sell its Citigroup common stock in small tranches throughout 2010 to avoid too much dilution to shareholders, according to analysts. But some wouldn't be surprised to see the Treasury get out quicker if the economy shows improvement.

The department accounted today that it intends to sell 7.7 billion shares, or roughly a 27 percent stake, using a pre-arranged written trading plan, it said in a press release Monday.