Selbstmordaten steigen, Depressionen breiten sich aus: Unter italiens Bankern geht die blanke Angst um. In der Anonymität des Internets finden sie Erleichterung – und schreiben sich den Frust von der Seele.
....Now, Rubin is leaving Citi as the bank ponders selling off two of its crown jewels -- the bread-and-butter predictable income stream from the Smith Barney brokerage operation, and the hugely profitable and successful Banamex, which has a presence in Mexico which borders on the monopolistic.
Neither of the mooted buyers makes much sense to me. Smith Barney to Morgan Stanley? Didn't Stanley learn its lesson with the Dean Witter acquisition? And Banamex to JP Morgan? I know there's an unspoken rule in financial journalism that JP Morgan always has to be top of any list of potential acquirers, but never, to my knowledge, has Jamie Dimon expressed the tiniest bit of interest in taking his Chase retail brand abroad.
Indeed, there's no obvious buyer for Banamex at all. ....
The idea of selling these assets does imply to me that Citi is facing up to reality: realizing that it can't save itself through acquisition, as it briefly attempted to do when Wachovia went belly-up, it's shrinking down to a more manageable size.
I wonder how much time has been spent pondering the really radical option: pulling a Bank of New York and selling off the retail-banking operation. Citibank in the US is a large but dreary bank which has never been run particularly well at the retail level ......
