Less than two months after being appointed chief executive of two of Wall Street’s most troubled banks, John Thain and Vikram Pandit received official confirmation of the scale of the challenges facing them as Merrill Lynch and Citigroup published annual results last week.

At Merrill Lynch, Thain was forced to explain the bank’s first loss since 1989 and its biggest since going public in 1971. At Citigroup, new chief executive Pandit was trying to offer answers for a 83% slump in group profits in a year in which its investment bank turned a $7.1bn (€4.8bn) profit into a $5.3bn loss.