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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChanceIs who wrote (225853)	10/23/2009 7:56:56 AM
From: ChanceIs	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

CITI's New APR = 30%, They're Toast >>>I commented in my linked post at the top of this thread that Chris Whalen was casting aspersions on Citi .... in the extreme. Some confirmation here per ZeroHedge....<<< Submitted by Bruce Krasting on 10/22/2009 19:49 -0400 I got a nasty letter from Citi Bank recently. They are raising the APR on my credit card to 29.99%. This is a losing strategy for Citi. Larry Small, the former Citi CEO built the bank into a powerhouse by leveraging global consumers. Now they are stabbing those clients in the back. I have been doing business with C for thirty years. I have borrowed from them and paid them back a number of times. I don’t owe them a penny and I will be closing those accounts. I don’t want to do business with people who try to put muscle on me. The end result will be that the only consumers who will do business with C are those who have no intention to pay back those loans in the first place. Talk about a bad bank. The NYS usury law sets the top rate at 16%. I am sure that Citi’s legal guys have found an angle around this. No doubt the rules are more favorable in S. Dakota where this letter originates. I live in NY and last I saw Citi had its headquarters here. This appears to violate the spirit of the NY statute. Possibly AG Cuomo will have an answer. I will ask him. Citi is owned by the taxpayers as a result of TARP. It is receiving billions in additional subsidies monthly in the form of zero interest rates from the Federal Reserve. One would have thought that they might have gotten the message by now that abusive lending was ‘old school’.

To: ChanceIs who wrote (225853)	10/23/2009 8:14:50 AM
From: ChanceIs	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

More AEI & Roubini Sorry, I left the best part of Roubini's comments out last night.... 'we have a huge (dollar based) carry trade going on ..... can make 30% ... it is the mother of all carry trades..' and.... 'we are in the mother of all assets bubbles' (he is talking now 10/09) 'the VAR is scary' Personal Comment: I will fill in Roubini's comments. In the carry trade,one borrows currency at extremely low rates from a country whose currency is declining. One then converts to a country with higher rates and invests there to earn a yield difference and a potential cap gain on the currency depreciation of the lending country. He has some data showing that recently (last six months?) one could have earned 30%. For this reason and many others he sees the American equity markets as very undesirable. He says that the carry trade today has gotten huge .... and everybody is in the same trade .... hence the comment that the VAR (value at risk) is monstrous. This is what killed rude a year ago. Everybody was long crude and carried out of the dollar. IMO if you don't understand the carry trade, you should get out of the market - I am deadly serious. Makin, John: - gotta be TBTF in order to survive today, - financial (bank) collapses devastate economies, - FED severely incompetent ... was concerned about inflation in fall '08; - China has a wealth storage problem (it is my observation that they are buying beaucoup oil) - why is he so bearish if the markets are showing green shoots ... financial markets respond to stimulus quickly (that doesn't mean that every other market does eg labor) ... year over year comparisons are trivial ... cash for clunkers and a bunch of other noise obscures the real situation; - on reform .. there is no reason to expect any reform from Congress ... "it is ignorant" ... the whole mess was caused by Congress stimulating housing with easy credit - and now they are back doing exactly the same thing.