Geithner forces Citi to cancel jet order (opens in new tab)

I think it goes something like this:

The People paid taxes to the government for the bailout, Citi got some of that money, which allowed them to survive, which allowed them to pay dividends to its shareholders.

Therefore, Citi is using tax dollars to pay its shareholder dividend.

So you'd rather punish the US taxpayer, who very likely has no direct investment in the company (outside of index funds), and has nothing to gain if the company does well? Sure, it sucks for the shareholders, but that's exactly what they signed up for - a share of the companies returns in good times and bad.

Because they get compensated for the risk they are taking. Now if the shareholders want to sue or overthrow the management they have that right.

Because that's the point of being a shareholder. We're not punishing anyone. The real question is why should the government reward people who bought bad equities?

The French could equally well object to Dassault buying any components from American companies (such as engines from GE).

What a fine recipe for recovery: every nation for itself, make companies buy only what's politically-favored, reduce competition, reduce world trade.

(Those were all popular-but-misguided mistakes that made the 1930's depression deeper and longer.)

From my understanding, there certainly would have been huge crack in the system had some of the big ones gone down just like that. This is because of the incest-like inter-connection between the major players; if one fails, it reneges on its derivative obligations, leaving several others' "naked" to risk. Those affected by this would have either lower credit rating or may not be able to fulfill their derivative obligations and so on.. domino effect. So, agreed, some of these biggies just had to be stopped from failing (AIG was the king of them) But what I fail to understand is that why is the government supporting these on an on-going basis? I would expect the government to strictly save them on the terms that they eventually wind down the operations or at least break up and sell to interested parties. It is very important for companies to fail every once in a while; in this special case the govt. should have helped soft-land their failure not prevented it!