Diana Yates Quotations

What would have happened to Citigroup under a weaker operating environment?

M&A is not going to be enough to carry the day for investment bankers as far as earnings go.

You have probably been hearing about how well they've done as far as integration goes, how steady and slow they've gone. The ... earnings here are really core earnings, not about ... stretching by security gains or one-time items. Their reserves are strong, the future looks strong for them.

We have been saying for some time that a bank is not a bank, ... and I think you are will hearing more of this, you know, look back at the Fed and what they had to regulate had 10, 20 years ago, it's totally different from a bank today, with the full financial service mix of products.

We think it trades at a discount. We think that it's a good opportunity, especially when we look for a good recovery into next year,

The Y2K concern just never really came to be, ... There doesn't appear to be any slowdown. It's definitely looking like this is going to be a trend.

The strong are getting stronger. There are more opportunities to buy at a cheaper price.

This is not a surprise. They had hinted they were going to do that that was one of the things they need to do to accomplish double-digit earnings growth. I would think Citigroup has a lot of potential to cut out some expenses when you look at all the mergers over last couple of years.

This is really about cutting expenses, ... You need the volume to create the synergies of scale. When you look at Citigroup, they have been looking to get bigger, particularly on the consumer side.

This gives them a good platform to build on, but I don't think this is the last deal you'll see, ... You'll continue to see them building on these types of transactions.

This is a wake-up call that boards no longer do deals for the people at the top but for what is best for the shareholders.

A bull market can cover a lot of sins and cultural issues.

It's more their diversification. The business revenue mix is not all from the IPO activity.

It's giving everybody an opportunity to do some spring cleaning.

Their earnings are coming out today. They're in the midst of merger activity, they have grown their franchise from $6 billion to $75 billion with acquisitions here in St. Louis. The ... numbers will tell us more in the next say 12 months as they fully integrate (different) franchises.

The key with Merrill is they're not as dependent on some of the venture capital private equity gains some of these companies earned earlier in the year, but have now lost.

Also when we look at the market share that it was able to keep this year in a pretty poor environment, we think that is also key. And that the company will come out very strong given a good economic and market recovery into 2002,

The Citigroup deal did mean a lot to bankers across all types of spectrums, ... The perception is that bigger is better.