Sandy Weill, the financier who built Citigroup through a series of acquisitions in the 1980s and 1990s, and created the model for the behemoth banks that dominate the industry, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that the biggest U.S. banks should be broken up.
“What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking, have banks be deposit takers, have banks make commercial loans and real estate loans, have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not too big to fail,” he said.
Which begged the question, where was this wisdom when Mr. Weill was building Citigroup?
“I think the earlier model was right for that time,” he said. “I think the world changed with the collapse of the housing market and the real estate bubble, and what that did because of leverage in certain institutions, so I don’t think it’s right anymore.”
You can watch the interview here.
