Citigroup, Wall Street’s biggest loser, is at last on the up

Unmanageable and uninvestible. That is how investors have long considered Citigroup. For over a decade the bank, which was once the largest and most valuable in America, has been a basket case. It trades at half the value it did in 2006, making it the only big American bank to fetch a valuation lower than its peak before the global financial crisis. Pick any measure and Citi is invariably dead last compared with its rivals. The firm has more staff than Bank of America, yet makes only a third of the profit.

Its prize for this miserable drubbing is not a participation trophy, but a consent order from regulators instructing it to improve internal oversight and change how it measures risk. The firm became the laughing-stock of Wall Street in 2020 when it accidentally wired $894m to creditors of Revlon, a failing company. That Jane Fraser became the first woman to run a Wall Street bank following the mess attached an asterisk to her appointment. “Glass cliff” is a term used to describe the phenomenon of women being appointed to top jobs at companies in deep crisis.