Troubled US banking giant Citigroup says it earned a profit of $4.3 billion in the second quarter, of this year, due to a big once-off gain on a joint brokerage venture.
Citi's results rebounded from a $2.49 billion loss in the same period a year ago, but the profit came from a once-off pre-tax gain of $6.7 billion from creating the Morgan Stanley Smith Barney joint brokerage.
Bank of America Q2 profits down
The deal, which closed on June 1, put Citi's Smith Barney division together with the trading division of Wall Street rival Morgan Stanley, with Citi getting cash as part of the deal.
Citigroup's total revenues were $30 billion, up a sharp $12.4 billion from the second quarter of 2008, due primarily to the Smith Barney gain.
In consumer banking, the group posted a profit of $217m, down 78% from a year ago, while its institutional client operations saw profits rise 16% to $2.8 billion. But Citi also posted hefty losses from its property and trading operations, as it continued to be battered by the global financial crisis.
The bank needed special help from the US government to weather the financial crisis. It lost $18.72 billion for all of 2008 before returning to the black with first-quarter earnings of $1.6 billion.
Citi, once the world's biggest financial services firm, has received $45 billion in bail-out funds from the government in the form of capital injections. In June, Citigroup finalised plans to convert its Treasury capital injection into shares, a move that gives the US government a 34% stake.
