Thursday, April 8, 2010

Fed Reviews Find Errors in Oversight of Citigroup

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/fed-reviews-find-errors-in-oversight-of-citigroup/?partner=yahoofinance

Even after the FED took over monitering Citigroup they failed to recognize just how serious the situation was, and they want us to give them more power WHY?
It seem to me that they (The FED) wouldn't know what to do with it if they had it anyway.


Citigroup ran into trouble under the noses of federal regulators. But even after taxpayers rescued the financial giant, regulators failed to monitor the company adequately, according to reviews by the Federal Reserve, Sewell Chan and Eric Dash report for The New York Times.

Excerpts of two Fed reviews were released on Wednesday as the committee examining the causes of the financial crisis began three days of hearings on the problems at Citigroup, Fannie Mae and the subprime mortgage market.
The panel heard a strong defense of the Fed from its former chairman, Alan Greenspan, who fended off a barrage of questions about the Fed’s failure to crack down on subprime mortgages and other abusive lending practices during his tenure.

But the excerpts, culled from thousands of documents turned over to the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, painted a troubling picture of the Fed’s oversight of Citigroup both before and after Mr. Greenspan left the Fed — and again after Citigroup received three taxpayer-financed bailouts.

The most recent documents from 2009 portray bank examiners from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then headed by Timothy F. Geithner, now the Treasury secretary, as overly optimistic about Citigroup’s prospects, according to a person briefed on their contents.