Mike Mayo, CLSA's pugnacious US banking research head, still has Citibank in his sights. "In Asia, Citibank is the Tiffany's of banking, but its corporate governance is like a five-and-dime store in Park Avenue."
Mayo has been pummelling the bank since the start of the financial crisis and gives it a further drubbing in his book, Exile on Wall Street: One Analyst's Fight to Save the Big Banks from Themselves. What irks him about the bank now, he said at the CLSA Investor Forum yesterday, is that earlier this year - or as he puts it, 147 days ago - shareholders voted against the compensation the bank was planning to give senior executives. The board said it would reconsider the matter but nothing further has been said.
Mayo says confidence in the US banking system is at a 40-year low. He has long argued that the solutions to the problems of the US banking system are more transparency, an end to excessive pay for poor performance and, critically, shareholders must act and force companies to operate more transparently and be accountable for their actions.
Yesterday he repeated his assertion that the Occupy Wall Street protesters posed less danger to the US capitalist system than some of the chief executives of American banks. Unsurprisingly, he believes Citigroup and Bank of America, given their poor governance, should be broken up into a more manageable size, while noting that smaller, simpler banks commanded higher valuations than the big complex banks such as Citibank, Bank of America and JP Morgan.
Mayo says these big banks give capitalism a bad name, and he wants them to clean up their act. He paid a visit to the Occupy Hong Kong site when he arrived on Sunday, and had a chat with the occupiers.
They seek him here, they seek him there, they seek him everywhere. Who can that be? Why Xi Jinping of course, the main contender to be our next president. But his failure to show up for meetings with visiting dignitaries has aroused no end of speculation. This has triggered jokes among the twitterrati that concern over Xi's non-appearance only goes to show the mainland has truly arrived on the world scene. Would anyone care, for example, if Joe Biden, the US vice-president, didn't turn up for a couple of days?