The first is this “we need big banks to serve global corporations” line. I’ve heard this before and I don’t buy it, for a number of reasons.
First (sorry, I have this habit of embedding numbered lists inside numbered lists), how global is Bank of America? Until it bought Merrill Lynch, it was pretty much a midget overseas compared to, say, Morgan Stanley, which was a small fraction of its size. How global is Wells Fargo? Yet those are two of our four biggest banks.
Second, the argument doesn’t pass the test of basic business logic. My company did (and does) business in many countries around the world. We had different alliances and different service providers in each one. There were overlaps — we worked with some consulting firms in multiple countries — but we made the decisions independently in each country, because every country is different. And in each country, you want the people who are the best in that country. Sometimes that will be a division of an American multinational; often it won’t. If I’m “General Electric” or “Johnson & Johnson,” I’m not going to do all my banking with Citigroup out of some misplaced customer loyalty.
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