Chuck Prince had to go, of course. No banker can flush away $8 billion and expect to keep his job. The Citigroup chairman and chief executive committed the cardinal banking sin of lending money to too many people who weren’t going to pay it back. He also suffered from the delusion there was always going to be a bigger mug out there - someone to whom the toxic loans accumulating on the Citigroup balance sheet could be sold on.

“As long as the music is playing you have to get up and dance,” he famously said this summer, almost at the very moment that the band were packing away their instruments and leaving the ballroom.

He inherited a difficult job four years ago. A lawyer, he was an obvious candidate to clean up what had become a bête noire to regulators from Wall Street to Tokyo. Name almost any financial scandal and Citigroup was involved - Enron, WorldCom, tainted equity analysis, not to mention the “Dr Evil” bond market rigging affair in London. Citigroup still isn’t squeaky clean but it has got into fewer regulatory scrapes since Mr Prince took over. For that he deserves credit.

But the world’s biggest bank still shows no sign of having a coherent strategy, diversifying willy-nilly and making acquisitions anywhere in the pursuit of scale. Like HSBC, another mammoth banking underperformer, it appears ever more difficult to control and manage.

The Citigroup board should be in no hurry to appoint a successor. In Sir Win Bischoff, formerly of the parish of Schroders, they have a safe pair of hands as interim chief executive. First they need to decide where they want to take the bank. Only then should they seek a suitable candidate to lead them there.

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