Give Corbat some time | Felix Salmon

Investors don’t particularly like big banks these days, but Citi would be a miserable failure if it were to shrink: it doesn’t have a scrappy mindset, and it never will. Corbat has been on hundreds of sales calls, all over the world, talking about the strength of Citi’s franchise, how it has been committed to [insert country name here] for over a hundred years, etc, etc. Citi needs to stay big for much the same reason that banks used to build their branches out of heavy stone: the perception of weightiness and permanence is exactly what its clients are looking for — especially in the turbulent world of emerging markets, where most of Citi’s future growth is going to come from.