The Morning Meeting

We have spent most of our morning session discussing a midday meeting in Chicago, and a middle-of-the-night conference call. First, Chicago. We wrote last week about this "surreal November", which still has a week left in it; well, here’s another snapshot from a surreal month. The Chicago meeting is where Barack Obama will formally announce his Treasury Secretary and the remainder of his economic team. For a time after his victory, the President-elect was careful to say there was only "one president", showing a polite deference to the current, lame duck occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Now the tenor has changed, thanks to the burgeoning financial crisis. So, though President Bush will make remarks about the economy this morning, it’s the Barack Obama’s event that will draw more attention today — along with talk of a fresh stimulus package that could reach north of $500 billion. While we’re tossing around mind-boggling sums, let’s get back to that middle-of-the-night conference call: it was all about Citigroup and the latest financial life raft tossed by the Feds to a major financial institution. The gist of which is: no collapse for Citigroup…yet. The bank gets a multi-billion-dollar guarantee for risky assets, and the federal government gets billions worth of preferred Citigroup shares. As we said, surreal. Stay tuned…