Citigroup issues are not new

Woes at Citigroup Began With Failed Bid for Wachovia

Excerpts:

As the global financial crisis drove Wachovia toward collapse, the government frantically engineered their marriage. At a bargain price of $1 a share, Vikram S. Pandit, Citigroup’s chief executive, was happy to oblige: The deal would have greatly enhanced Citi’s retail banking presence and added more stable consumer deposits to a balance sheet staggered by billions in write-downs on bad mortgage loans and related securities.

But like so many other things for Citigroup over the last several years, it fell apart. Less than a week later, Wells Fargo, the powerful San Francisco-based bank, swooped in with a higher offer. Citi was left in the lurch, without a business that was vital to its future.

...

Many analysts argue that the globe-spanning conglomerate, largely built by Sanford I. Weill, had never really worked as a cohesive unit. Different divisions have consistently battled, and promised synergies between units have rarely emerged.

“They never spent the time, the money or the energy to integrate all of the businesses,” said Meredith Whitney, analyst at Oppenheimer. “And so the credit card business speaks Mandarin while the mortgage business speaks Cantonese. It’s not a functional family. And because it’s not a functional family, it’s extraordinarily expensive to operate all the separate businesses, and you don’t get any of the advantages.”

Many of these problems were masked during the credit boom this decade. But with the financial crisis in full swing, the bank’s failure to unite its empire has become more exposed than ever.

“A lot of the issues facing Citigroup are not new issues, they have simply grown greater in severity,” said Michael Mayo, an analyst at Deutsche Bank.

Comment: The failed to integrate their business lines and thus could not leverage their synergies.