“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Maybe Sandy Weill didn’t recite those words when Citigroup was erected under his watch 10 years ago, but there sure are parallels between Shelley’s sonnet about the mighty and mythic Ozymandias, whose empire vanished in the sand thousands of years before, and the financial services behemoth.
Citigroup, once the largest bank in the world, is to be dismantled. The US government, not wanting to risk a three-peat (it already rescued the bank twice), has decided now to exercise its shareholder rights and tell Citigroup that the party’s over. All I can say is, it’s about time. Not about Citigroup, though there are plenty of experts who would say that the move is long past due. No, I mean about the government finally deciding to play shareholder, despite Hank Paulson’s desire that Treasury just fork the money over and keep its opinions to itself.
You know, it’s funny. We talk all the time about how some companies are too big to fail, but they insist on going ahead and doing it anyway. I would suggest this: Let’s identify a threshold at which a corporation is “too big to fail” and instead of letting them get grossly bloated beyond that point, we force them to break up. We could use revenues, or assets, or market share or a combination of measures to trigger an automatic break-up.
Yeah, I know, how anti-capitalistic. Well, unfettered capitalism got us into this mess. Maybe it’s time for fettered capitalism to get us out.
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