When a bank fouls up, an unhappy customer may yank his money and deposit it across the street. Oil-rich Kuwait has done the same thing, only it took $4 billion with it. New York's Citibank had managed investment funds for Kuwait since 1974, putting nearly $4 billion into stocks of about 350 U.S. companies, including AT&T, Atlantic Richfield and Phillips Petroleum.
Citibank did not trade the portfolio of stocks heavily on a day-to-day basis, which upset Sheik Salem Abdullah Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah, Kuwait's director of U.S. investments. "If you do not do it our way," he wrote to the bank...