Sovereign Funds Bring Bad Image With Cash (C)(MER)

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Getting a much-needed investment when a company is in deep trouble is nice. But, when it damages the firm’s public reputation it takes away some of the joy of surviving.

According to the FT, "over half of the 1,000 people polled by the market research group Strategy One said they “trusted Citigroup (C) less” after its recent decision to tap Middle Eastern and Asian sovereign funds." The number for Merrill Lynch (MER) was almost as bad.

It seems that Americans don’t like the idea of foreign government funds owning a piece of their financial icons. Whether this effects the likelihood of people doing business with the two firms is not clear.

Perhaps Americans would rather go to their Citi branch and find it is closed.

It is better to have to go to Kuwait to get their money out.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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