> what's their balance sheet? $280 billion?
Depending on how you count, it's almost $2T (double from 2002). It's tricky, of course, because much of their asset base is borrowed. How much of that can they actually spend? Beats me. But they had net income of $17B in 2004, $24.5B in 2005 and $21.5B in 2006 ($13.4B for the first 3 quarters of 2007); they paid out almost half of that in 2006. I don't need to tell you that's $76.4B in the last 4 years (2003=$17.8B, 2002=$15.2B). ADIA's $7.5B is chump change. Their Tier-1 ratio has dropped from 8.6% to 7.3%, but it's still well above the 6% that's required. They've had increasing dividends (by big leaps: 11% in 2006, another 10% earlier this year) for a while, so even slowing that down shouldn't necessarily be 'bad news' ...
> By the way, Melissa Lee just said on CNBC that after Prince Alwaleed
> bin Talal's bought his stake in Citi, the stock fell by another 44%.
> It paid off in the long run, but if that's a precedent, the problems
> aren't over yet.
I think it's pretty clear that Citi was a much smaller entity in 1998 and what Reed sowed he reaped. It was clearly quite capable of folding at the time; this is a much different situation.
Ok, I'm out of breath, and I put on some Jan 09 $40 calls, so I'm in
approximately the same boat (except for magnitude, hah!) as ADIA :-) :-)
:-)
/jordan