I am guessing that most MS/SB advisors will stay and take the retention. Why would you move? Where would you go? You could go to UBS for a fat check, but chances are your production will suffer in the short term, which would offset the retention bonus being smaller than a check to move. I guess I don’t see many MS/SB brokers moving unless they try to cut out the lower producers like ML/BAC did.

“Citi is basically going back to close to what it was 30 years ago when I first started in banking,” says Ezra Zask, a director at the consulting firm LECG, who was a global trading manager at Mellon Bank in the late-1980s as Citi was expanding its banking operations. “It’s like a 30-year experiment that didn’t quite work.”