Word: city
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Geographical diversification certainly is helping Citi--the company made twice as much money in Latin America as in the U.S. in the past quarter, and did even better in Asia. But while Weill and Prince did make a few big foreign acquisitions, that global footprint is mainly a legacy of the old, patrician Citicorp. What Weill's Travelers added was big-time investment banking, brokerage and storefront consumer finance. And it's from those parts of the business that most of Citi's woes have stemmed...
Then came the merger with Citi. It was tumultuous--a power-sharing agreement between Weill and Citicorp's John Reed soon fell apart--but at first very profitable. Amid the corporate scandals of 2001 and 2002, though, Citi's investment-banking arm landed in more than its share of controversy and legal trouble. One last big suit, filed by Enron Creditors Recovery Corp., goes to trial in April...
Prince, a lawyer, became Citigroup CEO in 2003 largely on the strength of his skill in resolving these legal hassles. But he led Citi smack into the next big financial scandal: subprime-mortgage lending. Over the past five years, Citi went from also-ran to leading issuer of the CDOs that take subprime mortgages or other loans and reprocess them into purportedly low-risk securities. Market jitters and ratings-agency downgrades have sent CDOs into a free fall--and now the banks have to account for the losses...
Merrill Lynch, which has also lost a lot of money and a CEO lately, followed a similar path. But Merrill at least began pulling back this year. Not Citi. "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance," Prince told the Financial Times in July in a quote that will follow him to his grave. "We're still dancing...
...music stopped for good the day Prince resigned, when Citi announced that it had $55 billion in subprime-related securities, mostly CDOs, still on the books. It also disclosed that it's holding almost $135 billion in securities for which there are no observable market prices--meaning that their valuation is determined by guesstimation--and is involved with another $167 billion in off-the-books CDOs and special investment vehicles. The normally mild-mannered stock and credit analysts who follow the firm reacted with downgrades and criticism--their main complaint being that Citi had been so slow in fessing...