Citibank

A possible, uh, takeover could happen there.

Gina Schoeman, Citi's South African economist, to join us, uh, for, uh, the markets today.

We're gonna be looking at that as well as US inflation as well to break down what that means for South Africa's developing economy.

Gina, welcome to The Money Show.

You know, so Kevin Warsh, uh, leading the Fed, is going to have to make a very difficult decision.

He came in as someone that people thought would be relatively dovish, but now, you know, everyone's pricing in Fed hikes, and it looks as if the Fed might have to actually act on inflation.

We don't think so at Citibank, but the market is certainly pricing that way.

We've actually just removed our rate cuts, um, as early as now, uh, from, from our, our forecast period at Citibank, but we are concerned about the way the Fed is thinking about inflation.

A lot of my students were saying like, and even some people I was helping with their portfolios, like we thought we were diversified.

We were with 10 different mutual funds or we were with 10 different advisors and but you look behind and they all had Citibank or they all had Bank of America or similar assets within funds.

So true diversification or even they may have had a technology company and a and a finance company or what have you, or consumer stable.

But true diversification comes from negative correlation.

There's some exceptions.

We've seen Citibank from time to time and Bank of America have had policies about no guns being in their branches.

We've had some reports of U.S. bank branches, Chase bank branches, and Wells Fargo branches prohibiting guns.

Those tend to be pretty isolated to single branches, maybe some... branch manager's decision.

You know who it is? It's [censored] Deutsche Bank, and it's [censored] JP Morgan.

It's [censored] Citibank, and we know it.

You know why? Because every three or four years, they pay, like, a $62 billion fine for [censored] laundering money for Hamas or whatever [censored] terrorist organization.

I mean, it's such a bunch of bull [censored], but you know what it does lock out? It locks out the, the, you know, the millions of [censored] immigrants that live here legally and want to send money back to, um, their family in Mexico.

A possible takeover could happen there.

Gina Schuman, Citi South African economist, to join us for the markets today.

We're going to be looking at that as well as U.S. inflation as well to break down what that means for South Africa's developing economy.

Gina, welcome to The Money Show.

He came in.

as someone that people thought would be relatively dovish, but now everyone's pricing in Fed hikes, and it looks as if the Fed might have to actually act on inflation.

We don't think so at Citibank, but the market is certainly pricing that way.

We've actually just removed our rate cuts as early as now from our forecast period at Citibank, but we are concerned about the way the Fed is thinking about inflation.

You worked in New York.

You worked for Citibank.

Can you take us back to that morning 25 years ago? And what happened? What was your story?

Yeah, I worked for Citibank.

The branch that my office was in was on the corner of Broadway and 56th Street in Midtown Manhattan.

I personally happened to be on a special assignment for Citibank.

Over the summer, they had purchased a bank on Long Island called EAB, and I was part of the Citibank group that was helping with the conversion.

The day after Labor Day, we'd converted all those EAB branches to Citibank.

In New York, yes, absolutely.

In the business he works at, which is Citi, and they have security like you've never seen before.

I mean, it's crazy.

I think one of the funniest – they get lots of protests – I don't know why they pick on this bank, but they get lots of protests.

And one time it had something to do with hot dogs.

And this lady had a hot dog costume on.

And Mason said it was happening right in front of him as the lady in the hot dog costume was trying to run into the corporate offices of Citibank.

And he said he had never laughed so hard in his life.

And that was what started the Pega journey.

And if you want to fast forward through 40 years, I would say the thing that as a company that we're proudest of is that our first two clients, who went live in 1984, if you can believe that, are not just customers to this day, they're Citibank and Bank of America, but they're massive clients of ours, and we're doing dramatic things for them and exciting new things across what's been five complete generational shifts in technology.

When you were starting out, you know, 1984, and you went to these big banks, you were 20-something, right?

I was 26 when I started it.

This is, of course, likely to drive home prices lower still.

Citi told clients on Friday that it expected two more rate rises this year amid what the bank's economists describe as a two-speed economy, where a deep housing correction was being offset by spending on artificial intelligence.

And city-tipped house prices would fall 10% from their peak by the first quarter of next year, a figure that doubled its previous forecast, and HSBC this week warned the correction in house prices could reach 13%.

But beyond that, I noted that Treasury Secretary Scott Besant says, over the next four years, we will have to have another Bretton Woods moment.