Sipsey Street Irregulars: The Tattered CitiBank Umbrella

Sunday, February 21, 2010

The Tattered CitiBank Umbrella

Gremlin #1: BUY! BUY! BUY!
Gremlin #2: SELL! SELL! SELL!
Brain Gremlin: Well, it's rather brutal here. Right now we are advising all our clients to put everything they've got into canned food and shotguns.

Bank run.

So Citi uses the umbrella for a corporate logo, eh?

Citigroup Warns Customers It May Refuse To Allow Withdrawals

John Carney | Feb. 19, 2010, 2:57 PM

The image of banks locking their doors to keep customers from making withdrawals during a bank run is what immediately came to mind when we heard that Citigroup was telling customers it has the right to prevent any withdrawals from checking accounts for seven days.

"Effective April 1, 2010, we reserve the right to require (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking accounts. While we do not currently exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past, we are required by law to notify you of this change," Citigroup said on statements received by customers all over the country.

What's going on? It seems that this is something of an error. The seven day notice policy only applies to customers in Texas, Ira Stoll reports at The Future of Capitalism. It was accidentally included on customer statements nationwide.

"Whatever the explanation, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in Citi," Stoll writes. "But it's hard to believe a bank would be sending out a notice like that on its statements."

The reality is more like this don't you think?

Maybe Citi's customers ought to listen to the Brain Gremlin.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...: Sounds like weather they've applied that "option" or not, CitiBank WILL do it sometime in the near future.
Also sounds like it's time to find a NEW bank (or CREDIT UNION!!), a little closer to home, a little more local, and NOT beholding to the Big Gub'ment TARP.

You HAVE been WARNED. Accidently or on purpose, makes no difference. And your pic is right on -- canned goods and shotguns. Hard durable goods will become the interim currency, until we can get back on silver and gold.

B Woodman
III-per; February 21, 2010 at 4:47 PM
jon said...: i started to comment on the citibeast, but it outgrew the 4096 character limit. must be the coffee.; February 22, 2010 at 8:08 AM
Toastrider said...: Yeaaaaah.

Excuse me, I think I better go get some more 9mm ammo.; February 22, 2010 at 7:58 PM
Happy D said...: I was just going to blast into the vault anyway.

Brain Gremlin gave me the best financial advice I ever got. Saved my portfolio.
I highly recommend his financial services. His down to earth practicality are unmatched.

For example. "Now, bear in mind, none of us has been in New York before. There are the Broadway shows - we'll have to find out how to get tickets. There's also a lot of street crime, but I believe we can watch that for free. We want the essentials. Dinettes. Complete bedroom groups. Convenient credit, even though we've been turned down in the past."

See the original interview; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byW49j2YSjE&feature=related

If only he had been in charge of the fed we may have avoided this mess.; February 23, 2010 at 2:40 AM
Anonymous said...: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=ax3yON_uNe7I&pos=11; February 24, 2010 at 3:22 AM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Sunday, February 21, 2010

The Tattered CitiBank Umbrella

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