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Banking, finance, and taxes

Goldman Sachs Likes Citigroup (C) Bonds

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Normally taking extra risk onto a bank balance sheet and getting a debt downgrade would not be considered good news. Citigroup (C) brought $49 billion of SIV debt in-house and, for unrelated reasons Moody’s cut its rating for Citi.

Goldman Sachs thinks that the moves make Citi bonds a good investment. In other words, things are better than they appear, and the debt will outperform similar investment.

According to Reuters: "Goldman said it believes the newly appointed Chief Executive Vikram Pandit will take appropriate action to raise capital levels in the first quarter either through additional third-party investments, dividend cuts or reduced risk-weighted assets."

Goldman and Moody’s can’t both be right.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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