What’s more, Bank of America said it never authorized a formal proposal to Citigroup. How massive would a Citi-BofA merger be? It would form a bank with $4 trillion in assets — almost twice the size of HSBC Holdings plc, the biggest European bank. The story seems meaningless because Citigroup already seems unmanageable at its current size — adding Bank of America sure wouldn’t help that problem. And Bank of America now controls almost 10% of the U.S. deposit market — the maximum allowed by regulators. Merging Citi and BofA would probably mean selling off one bank’s retail network, which would beg one question: Why bother? —
Peter Moreira
See Reuters story on The Wall Street Journal report
See Wall Street Journal story
Comments
The NewsVisual article on the rumored merger of Citi and BofA http://www.newsvisual.com/newsvisual/2007/11/bank-of-america.html#more suggests that common connections between the two banks’ Executives and Directors could make a deal workable.