Citigroup Posts $1.3 Billion Profit In 4Q As Revenue Falls

NEW YORK: Citigroup Inc posted a $1.3 billion quarterly profit on Tuesday, as losses on bad loans fell, but the bank missed estimates on its earnings as it struggled with a slump in revenue.

Shares of Citigroup fell about 3.5 percent to $4.95 in premarket trading.

The third-largest U.S. bank, which took $45 billion in U.S. bailout funds during the financial crisis, reported a net profit of 4 cents per share for the fourth quarter. That compared with a year-earlier loss of $7.6 billion, or 33 cents per share.

Analysts on average expected Citigroup to post a profit of 8 cents per share for the fourth quarter of 2010, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

The bank reported revenue of $18.4 billion, an increase from a year earlier but a 6 percent drop from the third quarter. Citigroup attributed the slump to a slowdown in its investment bank.

It was the fourth consecutive quarterly profit for Citigroup, and its first since the U.S. government finished selling off its stake in the company last month.

Shares of Citigroup closed at $5.13 on Friday -- their highest close since August 2009.

(Reporting by Maria Aspan; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman, Dave Zimmerman)

Copyright 2010 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions.

Comments

[OldTulsan]

02:10 AM on 01/20/2011

Banks are too-big-to-fail AND too-big-to-jail. Bankers caught laundering drug money are only fined...

http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=asU.b_fCjHTE
Wachovia's Drug Habit - Bloomberg.com

"...The bank didn’t react quickly enough to the prosecutors’ requests and failed to hire enough investigators, the U.S. Treasury Department said in March. After a 22-month investigation, the Justice Department on March 12 charged Wachovia with violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to run an effective anti-money-laundering program.

Five days later, Wells Fargo promised in a Miami federal courtroom to revamp its detection systems. Wachovia’s new owner paid $160 million in fines and penalties, less than 2 percent of its $12.3 billion profit in 2009.

[snip]

‘No Capacity to Regulate’

Large banks are protected from indictments by a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory.

Indicting a big bank could trigger a mad dash by investors to dump shares and cause panic in financial markets, says Jack Blum, a U.S. Senate investigator for 14 years and a consultant to international banks and brokerage firms on money laundering.

The theory is like a get-out-of-jail-free card for big banks, Blum says.

“There’s no capacity to regulate or punish them because they’re too big to be threatened with failure,” Blum says. “They seem to be willing to do anything that improves their bottom line, until they’re caught...”

[danusgram]

06:43 PM on 01/18/2011

Fire Bankrupt the President and bring all those American jobs back to this country..problem solved!

[cassie reinara]

02:30 PM on 01/18/2011

If a real audit using old FASB rules of a lot of these so-called mega-banks, you would find a lot of these banks are in fact insolvent and that there books have been cooked, so this news is the proverbial tip of the iceberg when it comes to the veracity of their earnings reports.

[cats530]

02:02 PM on 01/18/2011

Must be their phony-baloney accounting schemes.

[jteamaz]

12:03 PM on 01/18/2011

Only 1.3B in profit....hmmm...I wonder how many will lose their jobs over that. How could they possibly survive with so little profit?

[AgingLady]

11:51 AM on 01/18/2011

Stored profits? Bonuses? Lies? I don't trust finance suits any more.

[ggmome]

11:07 AM on 01/18/2011

That's a SHAME! Check out their affiliates, like Allied Cash Advance, and see how their profits are 'jacked' up, with 249% interest...

[INDIVIDUALTERRY]

11:37 AM on 01/18/2011

Citi owns Allied ? huh.

[blueken]

09:17 AM on 01/18/2011

I'm sure Citi is sitting on a lot of real estate investments. I'm also sure that it is impossible to figure out the real value of those real estate investments on the balance sheet. So, with so much equity of questionable value, how do you come up with an accurate figure for profits? Bottom line, I don't trust the "too big to fail" banks.

[Sundialsvc4]

09:47 AM on 01/18/2011

I agree. Fav'd.

When someone is shown to be a liar, someone who subsequently believes him is himself shown to be a fool.

These "too big to fail" business organizations are, in truth, "too big to succeed." They are engaged in three businesses which are mutually-exclusive, as Messrs. Glass and Steagall clearly understood. It is not possible for a single organization to simultaneously (and truthfully) be in the business of "finance," "insurance," and "banking."

Nevertheless, there are plenty of shells on the table under which it is easy to hide a little ball. "The answer," in short, can be "anything you want it to be at any particular time." If you want trillions of dollars' worth of eee-zee mo-nee from the guv'mint, "presto, you're broke." But if you want to "justify" paying hundreds of millions in bonuses, "you're rolling in the dough."

It cannot be both. "Unless you want it to be."

[arkymorgan]

04:31 PM on 01/18/2011

Fanned for 'too big to succeed' - spot on!

[vippy]

10:14 AM on 01/18/2011

Now all that will be fixed when Obama's team joins Citigroup, Wall Street and

[jo smith456]

09:14 AM on 01/18/2011

from Another blogger's post:
TOXIC DEBT HIDDEN ENR0N-STYLE - These are the Banks that must BE "GMed" and cleaned out and sold back as Clean IPOs.
Rank_Banker__Amount Hidden ENR0N-Style of T0XIC Junk
1 JPM CHASE $76 Trillion
2 B OF A $71 Trillion
3 G0LDMAN $49 Trillion - Up over prior quarter
4 C1TIGROUP $42 Trillion
5 MORGAN STANLEY $41 Trillion
http://www.occ.gov/topics/capital-markets/financial-markets/trading/derivatives/dq110.pdf     Search for Table 2
Near WORTHLESS Derivatives hidden OFF-THE-BOOKS with MASSIVE FEES COMPLETELY EXTRACTED AND USED TO REWARD BANKSTER CRIMINALS!

[vippy]

10:15 AM on 01/18/2011

Don't feel bad, now they are making big profits off the oil they had stored off-shore in supertankers which they bought cheap with our bailout money.