What is the right size for Citi?
The mandate to cut costs is huge. We’ve made a lot of progress already. In the fourth quarter of last year we had $16.1 billion in expenses, and in the quarter we just reported they were $14.4 billion, so that means since the end of last year we have taken 11% of our expenses on a reported basis. We just announced that we will cut our expenses to between $50 billion and $52 billion next year. If you take the last four quarters, our expenses were about $60 billion, so that would be a 15% reduction. We’ve already made substantial progress this year, and we have every intention to continue to cut expenses. After years and years of growing head count and peaking at 375,000 employees, we are down to about 350,000 and we aim to get below 300,000 in the first part of next year. That’s obviously a change in direction. This has come through just plain old hard work, changing compensation plans, widening the spans of control and cutting out layers, eliminating redundant technologies. Our total a
