Dick Bove likes to rant and sometimes you just expect it to be “next verse, same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse” but every once in a while he says something truly chilling. Per FTAlphaville, a dissection of his recent rant, entitled Socialism in Action, looks at $C’s deal to sell Phibro – which, when you consider that Phibro was one of the few divisions of Citi that was making a profit, and a rather handsome one at that, is at best cannibalistic and at worse is, as Bove says, a result of government strongarming:

Citigroup sold its Phibro proprietary trading business to Occidental Petroleum (OXY/$79.54/NR) for what appears to be the unusually low price of $250 million (private sources claim $450 million).  It is not unrealistic to indicate that no company sells one of its divisions for less than its income. Thus, this sale was not in the interest of Citigroup shareholders. Stated differently, Citigroup would have been expected to generate $250 million from its Phibro division in 8 months or by May next year if it were not sold.

Emphasis FT’s but I concur. Of course, what move by any of the banks lately has been in the best interest of holders of the common? Government pressures were blamed for this sale, because of allegations that the high-risk trading at Phibro amounted to taking the government’s bailout money to the casino (Paul Volcker and many others heaped tons of haterade onto this idea, suggesting that banks were trading on commodities with government funds instead of making loans to small businesses), and, of course, the whole nasty Andrew Hall bonus thing.

Bove then goes into some rant about $OXY having ties to Lenin and Stalin or something which I’ll skip over, but he gives us this horrific gem in conclusion:

Citigroup is, in many respects, the template on which American banking will be fashioned in the future. This may not be positive.

DO NOT WANT.