BREAKING NEWS! Shea Stadium To Be Renamed FDIC Stadium

by Ron Daly 

...Just kidding. The LAST thing I need is a bunch of Mets fans coming after me.

But you know the story by now. Big bank needs money, big bank gets money, people start evaluating where the money the big bank had was spent before a bailout was needed. Hence, this story about Shea Stadium becoming Citibank Stadium. 

See, it's not that Citigroup took a bushel full of taxpayer money and ran to Shea Stadium to buy up the name as some news channels made it seem today. These deals take years and years to start up and pay off.  The 20-year deal, announced two years ago, was reported to be a record $400 million and entailed naming the new stadium Citi Field after it opened in 2009 in the New York borough of Queens, adjacent to the team's old home, Shea Stadium. 

Citi has just been cursed with the worst possible timing. And now's just about the worst time for everything. Except buying things, which people aren't doing because it's the worst time for everything else.  

For instance: With this bailout deal it could be a bad time for smaller banks that can't afford a stadium. Because when the FDIC comes loping in to offer help to the bigger financial institutions, if something bad happens, the smaller banks might have to absorb most of the cost. This article from the CU Journal goes into detail about the affect the deal will have on smaller, community focused banks.   

And how tough is it for banks to get bailout funding? Well, we don't know how it's done and we don’t know how they are spending it, but we can show you who's doing it. There is a live site where participants in the Government Investment Plan, the Treasury Department’s bank-share purchase program, that tracks a list of participating companies. Click here to see the list of financial entities and how much of the "bail" they're getting.  

Does any one know a website or service that tracks how the bailout money was spent?