The U.S. government will exchange up to $25 billion in emergency bailout money it provided Citigroup Inc. for as much as a 36 percent equity stake in the struggling bank, greatly increasing the risks to taxpayers as voter unhappiness about the broader bailout program rises.
Investors appeared disappointed in the deal and expected dilution of their stake, sending shares plummeting 94 cents, or 38.2 percent, to $1.52 in afternoon trading. Stocks tumbled early but pulled off their lows as the Dow Jones industrial average came within 34 points of breaching the 7,000 mark for the first time in more than 11 years.No big surprise here, the investors don't want anything to do with it.
The conversion will make the government the largest shareholder in Citigroup, but company officials said they still expect to call the shots.Good luck with that.
Investors have punished the shares of Citigroup and other banks in recent weeks out of concern the government could nationalize troubled banks, which would involve replacing management and wiping out shareholders.
Treasury officials and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have said there are no plans to take such steps.
Of course these things are never "planned". They just happen. And it doesn't surprise me that the investors want to get out of the cave before the Indiana Jones giant marble runs them over.
Dean Baker, co-director for the Center for Economic Policy and Research, a liberal think tank, said the government's efforts to avoid a takeover amount to "a further handout to Citigroup."
"We really should own it outright," he said, given that taxpayers have provided the company $45 billion in assistance, several times its market value.
Sounds like government thinking to me.
I'd definitely say, if you have any investements there, get them out. Because when the government nationalizes it, you probably won't have anything left. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
Unfortunately, 2005 was a really sucky year for movies when really horrible crap managed to get itself and it's actors/actresses not only nominated but awarded.
I guess I'll start with the dishonorable mention list because to skip it would by like ignoring the pink elephant in the livingroom.
On to the real list.
Honorable Mention:
Honorable Mention
The Village
For Desktops:
Ubuntu (and siblings) - Good hardware detection and configuration. As a decendent of Debian, has a LOT of packages available. Also offers the proprietary packages that Debian won't touch. One weakness I've noticed, is that Ubuntu's Samba is not compatible with Geexbox (see below), not sure why.
For Servers:
Debian - Excellent for a large number of tasks.
Ubuntu Server - Almost as good as Debian, and as a decendent of Debian gains almost all of it's strengths, but has the same Samba weakness as Desktop Ubuntu when sharing to Geexbox.
Gentoo - Phenominal for getting the absolute best out of a machine... if you're willing to put the time in to get the system running, which arguably can be a headache.
For Routers:
Smoothwall - Great for user friendly setup and maintenance.
IPCop - Slightly less userfriendly than Smoothwall, but includes more advanced features, which can confuse even me at times.
For Media Players:
Geexbox - Usable as a customizable live CD. Can read Samba and NFS file shares, though has difficulty seeing/dealing with Ubuntu based shares (not sure why).
XBMC Live - Xbox Media Center. Great of features, but unfortunately requires advanced 3d hardware more advanced than the GeForce2MX that's in my media player box.
For File Serving/Storage:
FreeNAS - absolutely beautiful, a little detailed to set up, but easy to administer. Big giant gaping weakness, because it's BSD based, it likes UFS filesystems which don't handle power failures gracefully at all. Damaged filesystems, machine boots, then goes zombified with trying to make heads or tails of the filesystems. So to repair the system, you have to boot a different live BSD distro, fix the filesystems, then reboot back into Freenas. Great for administration... if you never EVER EVER have an unanticipated power failure.
Everything else:
KNOPPIX - One of the best Live CD's ever. Without KNOPPIX, I'd probably still be fighting Windows every day to get anything done. Excellent for learning and getting comfortable with Linux before taking the big step of doing a full install. Also great for bringing a system up for doing repairs or just to copy information from the hard drives to somewhere else on the network.
