CITIGROUP MADE more money from mortgage lending and trading stocks and bonds in the third quarter, but profit dropped after it wrote down the value of its retail brokerage business by $4.7 billion.
The results were better than analysts had expected, and the bank’s shares moved up 3.5 percent. A measure of Citigroup’s lending profit rose, even as competitors’ lending margins fell.
But the writedown of its joint venture with Morgan Stanley, amounting to $2.9 billion after taxes, reflects the bank’s lingering difficulties from the financial crisis.
Chief executive Vikram Pandit is reshaping the bank to focus on commercial and investment banking, retail banking for relatively wealthy customers globally, and transaction processing. But the bank’s Citi Holdings unit, which houses businesses and assets the bank is looking to shed, continues to lose money – $3.56 billion in the latest quarter, compared with a loss of $1.22 billion a year earlier. Citigroup posted third-quarter net income of $468 million, or 15 cents a share, compared with $3.77 billion, or $1.23 a share, a year earlier. – (Reuters)
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