Citi

Henry Kissinger confides his judgment that small, vulnerable nations breed the best statesmen (he cites Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and Austria's Bruno Kreisky), whereas big, powerful countries can get by with mediocrities.

The same must be true of companies.

A company as big as Citi, and as protected by federal banking regulations and anti-takeover rules, doesn't worry about rough treatment at the hands of raiders or activist shareholders. Not that the supermarket strategy would have been bad if it properly reflected what a supermarket is -- an exercise in horizontal integration that brings together the products and services a consumer would need to manage his financial life. Citigroup was an exercise in vertical integration. A supermarket doesn't mistake who its customer is -- the retail shopper

Yet Citi tied itself up in conflicts over whether its customer was the manufacturer of investment opportunities, such as companies floating stocks and bonds, or the consumer of them, such as retail investors and their financial advisers and fund managers.

Presumably they didn't mean one billion CFOs peddling IPOs, or one billion Special Purpose Vehicles stuffed with off-balance-sheet subprime mortgages. They meant customers for traditional banking services, who'd rely on Citi to manage their wealth, transactions, debts and cash balances, extracting safe and steady revenue without playing a lot of Wall Street roulette.