Citi’s salvation signals the midpoint in this crisis

As I said previously my bet would be that Citi’s salvation signals the midpoint in this crisis. Don’t break out the Champaign just yet as one analysis Meredith Whitney keeps reminding us Citi as well as many other banks suffer from the “junk in the trunk” syndrome and these bad assets are systemic and slow to heel. On the bright side the recent resolution for Citi seems far more satisfying than the previous alternatives of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.

At this point weak economic data is looking more and more like its being priced into the market and it appears that for the moment many stocks have already made there lows ,yet it would not surprise me to see the market as a whole make some lower lows. Long term investors have begun to pick up equities and fixed income predicated on the idea that yield equals good values and if not at lest you are getting paid to wait and wait and wait....Some of the large scale institutional barging hunters are becoming ever more active and even starting to compete for controlling stakes in various entities with each other .Some of the more recent data though far from benign has come in not nearly as bad as many had come to expect. It appears at the moment that the end of the world has been forestalled to yet another day.