by Calculated Risk on 1/15/2008 12:00:00 PM

There comments are very telling about the future return on capital, and possible additional shocks. (all emphasis added). Also see the comments on tightening credit card standards, evaluating current customers and the trade-offs between HELOCs and credit cards.

From the Citi conference call:

“The dividend reduction reflects the approximate sizing of our dividend relative to our growth opportunities and the volatility of each of our businesses. After a careful analysis of our businesses, given the normal risk that we have on an ongoing basis, we were faced with two choices -- either increase the excess capital that we carried permanently to reflect the ongoing exposures of the Company or better align our payout ratio so as to be able to restore our targeted capital ratios in a reasonable timeframe after a capital-reducing event. We recommended a dividend policy change to the Board alongside the capital raise and they approved this change yesterday. When the Company returns to a more normalized level of earnings generation and capital ratios, we have the flexibility to supplement the dividend with share repurchases.”

And from the Q&A:

Richard Bove, Punk Ziegel:

The second question would relate to the cash flow indication that you just mentioned and that is, to my knowledge, the $26 billion that has been taken either in write-downs or in loan loss provision are all non-cash charges. I think I heard it said that the equity raises will put the relevant ratios above what they were targeted to be let's say three months ago. Given the fact that there is no significant cash charge here, given the fact that the Company is going to wind up with perhaps some excess capital, I find it difficult to understand why you would cut the dividend. In addition, since by cutting the dividend, you have knocked, at least today, $5 billion off the value of the stock, I am wondering where do the shareholders show up in this whole calculation? You've lost 40% of his dividend, his stock price is down $5 billion in value, and from what I think I heard you say, if there is no prospect of the dividend going back up again, there is going to be share repurchases as opposed to replacing the dividend. So how does the stockholder benefit by this?

Gary Crittenden, Citi CFO:

Let me talk first of all, Dick, about the way we have thought about the dividend and just give you a little bit more color around that. So if you took the kind of a normalized situation -- so if you go back over the last few years and we have had say a $20 billion earnings level and you assumed a 55% payout ratio or something like that, that gave you 45% of that capital essentially to allow the business to grow and to take care of any shocks that might happen in the system assuming that we ran the Company right at the kind of targeted ratios that we have, right at 6.5% in TCE and 7.5% in terms of our tier one ratio. That is basically the assumption that you made. That essentially, even under that scenario, gives you relatively little capital to rebuild your capital in the event of a shock scenario and obviously one of the things that I have to, as part of my job, think about all the time is what is the implications of the Company of having a shock scenario happen and we have just experienced one of those. We have just been through that and we have obviously taken the charge associated with that in this quarter. And that kind of an event could happen at some point down the road. If it did happen at some point down the road, the proper way I think to manage this would be to do one of two things -- either to hold significant additional excess capital -- so even in the event of a shock, you are able to recover relatively quickly -- or alternatively, to reduce the payout ratio that would reflect what you believe the growth prospects of the business and the inherent exposures of the Company to be. Those are kind of the opposing trade-offs that we have as an organization and having thought through very carefully the amount of excess capital that we would need to hold the return on capital implications associated with that and looked at the trade-off of that relative to the payout ratio given the businesses that we are in and the inherent volatility that we think exists in those businesses, we tried to make the right long-term decision. So this was not a -- this decision was not made for the next quarter or the quarter after that. It was a recommendation that we made looking forward overtime, trying to consider the growth prospects of the Company and as I say, the inherent exposures that the Company has and with an eye towards trying to maximize the return on equity that we can provide back to our shareholders. And all of that kind of taken together really reinforced the decision that we made around the dividend. Now there is no doubt that this is a short-term difficult decision for us, but we felt, in the context of the uncertainty that exists in the environment, as well as the growth opportunities that exist in front of us, that both the capital raise made a lot of sense for us, as well as a dividend policy that positions us appropriately to rebound in the event of an exposure event down the road.

Bove:

A final thought on that and that is that I think I heard a number of times said that the dividend was being sized relative to the growth prospects of the Company. So if I assume a 40% payout ratio and a dividend of about 28, presumably the Company is setting out a 320 if you will, ability to show earnings over some timeframe, which would be substantially lower than let's say the $1.25 inherent in the second-quarter numbers. So is the Company, in fact, saying that it's earning capacity is substantially less and because it's earning capacity at substantially less, shareholders should take a $5 billion one-day hit in their holdings and a 40% reduction in their dividends?

Crittenden:

Dick, obviously, we don't give forecasts for where we think the future is going to go. We also carefully did not talk about a payout ratio here. We didn't think about it necessarily in terms of a specific payout ratio. We thought about it in terms of the capital formation and our ability to respond relatively quickly to a stress scenario in the environment. And it doesn't -- I mean it mathematically calculates into a payout ratio, but that is not the way we derived it.

And the following exchange on consumer credit cards:

Mike Mayo, Deutsche Bank:

Good morning. Can you talk some about the trade-off between pursuing growth and managing risk and as you pointed out, the credit card losses are up over 100 basis points in three months with unemployment only at 5% and mortgages getting worse. At the same time, short-term funding costs are higher over the last three months. So does that encourage you to pull back growth at all? ... specifically, as it relates to US credit cards, the margin was down linked quarter. Is that an area where you might want to pull back or increase pricing or neither?

Cittenden:

Actually all of the above is happening, Mike. So we are tightening underwriting standards as you might guess. We are evaluating the open lines of credit that exist with current customers. We are doing cross reference work between customers where we have the mortgage position and where we hold the credit card and obviously, we are off of promotional balances essentially as we go through this fourth quarter. So this is a time -- as you no doubt have read -- there was a good article in the New York Times a couple of days ago about this. This is no doubt a time where, in the credit card business, you could make some substantial missteps if you weren't careful in watching the credit because there is some natural growth in outstandings that will take place. There's a bit of a substitution effect between home-equity loans and credit card loans and we are very aware of what those trade-offs are. This falls into the second category that Vikram just talked about. There is some growth that's good growth and there is other growth, which can be dangerous if it is done without the proper kind of risk parameters around it. But I think our team is very focused on these issues right now in the card business. Obviously, we have taken a bit of a reserve increase in the card business in this quarter, but we are very focused on what the risks are around the inherent or natural growth that is going to happen in that business over the next year.