JSM Financial: U.S. Treasury to begin selling Citigroup shares.

April 26, 2010 - PRLog -- According to a press release from the U.S. Department of the Treasury available to JSM Financial authorization to sell 1.5 billion of its 7.7 billion Citigroup Inc. shares has been granted to underwriter Morgan Stanley as part of its strategy to wean the bailed-out bank off of federal support.

Citigroup was forced to get a $45 billion federal bailout at the height of the global financial crisis, in late 2008 to avoid collapse.

With Barack Obama recently saying that he wants to recoup “every single dime” of the U.S. taxpayer’s money from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, Citi’s Chief executive Vikram Pandit has been eager to move away from the banks reliance on government funding.

“We’re putting TARP out of its misery,” JSM financial believes the Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said in a recent television interview. “This is going to cost us much less in fiscal terms than even the S&L crisis,” he added referring to the fall of savings and loan banks in the 1980s and 1990s.

According to the Treasury statement, it will “begin selling its common shares in the market in an orderly fashion under a pre-arranged written trading plan with Morgan Stanley,” the Treasury's sales agent.

The Treasury added that it expects to “provide Morgan Stanley with authority to sell additional shares after this initial amount,” JSM Financial learned.


JSM Financial believes that Citigroup’s CEO  recently said that he felt a “whole lot better” now than he did a year ago, emphasizing that he believes the bank is now “positioned for growth.”

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