The Economist November 21. 2012 The fall of the universal bank Exit the rock-star bosses Before the great crash of 2008, the universal banks swaggered around London, Hong Kong and New York. Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche and UBS imagined they could be all things to investors in (almost) all corners of the globe. Five years on, in 2013, such ambitions will seem quaint as the American and European banks find themselves either shrinking further or increasingly marginalised. Far from competing in every category from asset management to equity derivatives and fixed income, the universal banks will abandon businesses and locations, through forced disposals or severe cost-cutting. From the ruins, a new order will emerge: one with different capital structures, new credit channels and a continued shift in power towards Asian institutions, some of which will be either partly or wholly government-owned. The decline of the universal bank will pass unlamented. The promise of the cross-selling financial supermarket has long been eclipsed by the destruction of shareholder value after the crash. Sandy Weill, universal banking's evangelist-in-chief when at the helm of Citigroup, recanted publicly in 2012. In 2013, combining stolid utility banking and bonus-hungry investment banking under one roof will look even more questionable. As one City of London veteran says: "It's like putting Tesco together with Harrods— it doesn't work." The new banking order in 2013 will not be fashioned by a son-of-Glass Steagall, the Depression-era act which separated commercial lending and investment banking. There will be little appetite for a giant legislative overhaul, coming on top of America's Dodd-Frank act and Britain's Vickers commission. Instead, the power of universal banks will be eroded by market forces driven by the new Basel 3 rules on capital ratios as well as a more intangible but vital factor: culture. In 2012 universal bankers and, more importantly