Word: cities
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have one last and very large asset: their names. Marketers used to call this brand equity. It was a nonsensical way of saying that having a company's name on hundreds of buildings and sports stadiums made customers more comfortable being customers. Decades of advertising did that for Citi and B of A. The credit crisis has not entirely ruined those reputations. Citi retail customers in Italy probably don't worry about the hundred dollars they have in the big bank. It is simply very difficult to see how the "body of the brand" can be exhumed...
Richard Parsons is the new face of the struggling, bailout-needy Citigroup. The former CEO of Time Warner Inc. (TIME's parent company) became Citi's Chairman just days after the company announced an $8.3 billion fourth-quarter loss - its fifth quarterly loss in a row - and revealed that it would separate its retail banking business from the risky assets dragging it down. Citi may be taking on water faster than it can dump it out, but Parsons is no stranger to financial struggle. When he took over AOL Time Warner in 2003, the media conglomerate was $27 billion...
Decades of conservatism and very little new lending--by the mid-1940s, more than half of City's assets were in U.S. government bonds--gave way to a new era of growth in the 1950s. The drivers were international expansion and domestic innovation, and the leader was Walter Wriston. The bank's CEO from 1967 to 1984, Wriston changed the y in City to an i. After years of success, though, he left the bank with billions in bad loans to Latin America. Only profits generated by the U.S. retail-banking and credit-card juggernaut built by Wriston's prot?...
...know the rest of that story. Citi is now on life support, owing its continued survival to $45 billion--so far--in federal aid. Its beleaguered top-management team is trying to undo most of the 1998 merger with Travelers. And the new Obama Administration is faced with the somewhat conflicting priorities of trying to avert a depression, nurse Citi and other banks back to health and prevent a repeat of the excesses that led to today's troubles--all while taking care that the U.S. government doesn't dig its own financial grave in the process...
...What Citi's history illustrates is that these are not new dilemmas and that they've never been perfectly resolved. Banks and financial systems are inherently fragile, beset by a natural tendency to careen from fear to greed and back. We're deep in the fear part of the cycle right now. So what should government...