Citi has been unwieldy, impossible to manage and too big to fail for well over 30 years. Post-crisis, however, it has effected an impressive transformation.
The big picture: Its earnings, unjuiced by the excess leverage of the early 2000s, have largely regained their pre-crisis levels — an impressive enough achievement even before you realize that the bank has shrunk considerably over the past decade.
The bottom line: Given Citi's status as an accident-prone and highly regulated central part of America's financial plumbing, the bank's first job is to be safe and boring. Citi's profitability is high enough that it should comfortably be able to weather a downturn, but not quite so high as to be a warning signal that the bank is taking on too much risk.
The bank's shareholders are restive, however. The FT's Robert Armstrong came out with a 2,000-word "big read" this week devoted to the proposition that Citi is underperforming and needs a "strategic shift."
Be worried: The last time we saw headlines like this was in 2007, when Fortune described Citi's artificially inflated prior-year earnings as "less than stellar" at $21.5 billion, and when CEO Chuck Prince desperately told the FT that "when the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance."
Our thought bubble: Citigroup's profits are already huge, at roughly $2 billion per month. Shareholders want the bank to try to boost them further. The rest of us, not so much.
