The Washington Post has a must read history of Citigroup this morning. The gist: The bank has always pushed the envelope with investments that, at times, has led to big gains and, at others, led to massive losses.
Here’s the key graf:
The company was just another New York bank until the last decade of the 19th century, when a new chief executive, James Stillman, began to win the business of an emerging class of giant corporations. Those firms were concentrating the control of American industry — and eventually global industry — on the island of Manhattan. Citigroup would prosper as their partner. A pattern was set. The city’s business community and the bank would push further than their rivals, and prosper more, and every so often they would stumble badly. “It became a great bank because they were innovators,” said Richard Sylla, an economics professor at New York University who specializes in the history of financial institutions. “They were early to become a great corporate bank, they were early to get overseas, they were early to get into the investment banking business, they were early to get into consumer lending.”
Citi, it is worth noting, saw its stock prices shoot up nearly 40 percent on Tuesday after CEO Vikram Pandit said the company has been profitable for the first two months of 2009. This comes as the government continues to consider more bailout funds for the company, on top of the $45 billion in has already sunk into the bank.