I think that the public money that's gone into Citi so far would have paid for the company several times over. Converting preferred to common does look like rearranging deck chairs, as the saying goes. And the only worse thing than the government owing a bank is the government being a minority shareholder. The begged question: whose interests are being protected here at the taxpayers' expense? Some Saudi royal's, is what it looks like.

I'm more worried that Congress will begin legislating special favors for to these new public/private entities in a way that puts the wholly private banks at a competitive disadvantage.

How long before the (partially) gov't owned banks are treated like the other GSE's (Frannie/Freddie) that precipitated this mess?

Let Citi Bank, AIG, and all the other banks whom the US taxpayers have bought a time to 3 times over fail.

Once the these and the other big banks fail, then nationalize the banking system according to the Swiss model.

PanchoPDX,

Nice spin there boi. Get your a** back to NW Republican where others will take your "blame Democrats first, while conveniently forgetting that Republicans governed from 1994 until 2006 type mentality." I take stock of the past and your partisan bulls**t will not escape my ruthless critique.

What preceded this mess?

1. Utter gutting of the Glass-Steagall Act by the Gramm-Beach-Bliley Act of 1999.

2. Individuals with the same conservative, no government, no regulation values as the former chairman of the SEC, Christopher Cox.

3. Alan Greenspan promoting inflation by lowering interest rates during a time when the US Government had an inane, retarded policy of funding two wars with bonds from China and initiating the largest tax cuts since Kennedy.

4. Republican economic policy that promoted big government welfare for the military industrial complex, while bankrupting the US treasury with tax cuts during a time when we were trying to pay for 2 wars.

5. Derivatives that turned a pile of s**t into a pile of gold.

Democrats are fixing the mess of the utter absence of leadership from the Republican Party for the past 8 years. Excuse my language but I have no respect for a group of individuals who worship Reagan, think that 1994 policies will bring a win in 2010, and believe that trotting Sarah Palin out in 2012 will get the female vote because they think that females are so stupid that they will vote for a woman regardless of her policy positions.

Here's a super summary snapshot of the 'economic collapse' by a most astute world-economics analyst.

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So dense in detail that I'm going to list the section headings only.

America's Fiscal Collapse, by Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, March 2, 2009.

“We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger" -- President Barack Obama, State of the Union Address 24 Feb 2009
"Strong economic medicine" with a "human face"
War and Wall Street
The Budget Deficit
Fiscal Collapse
Structure of The Public Debt
The Bush Administration's "Bank Bailout"
Spiralling Public Debt Crisis
Consolidation of the Banks
Circular and Contradictory Relationship
Continuity from Bush to Obama
Concluding Remarks

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