What a waste of everybody’s time. The day after the Federal Reserve was forced to release the results of its latest stress tests, the US bank index finished flat. (All of Wall Street was talking about the sore South African ping-pong pensioner anyway.) Shares in JPMorgan, which on top of “passing” the stress test announced a mega buyback and dividend hike, were also flat. And the highest profile bank to “fail”, Citigroup, was down just 3 per cent.

But Citi should feel hard done by, nevertheless. The ridiculously tiny numbers in table 2 of the Fed’s longer release show that by the third quarter of last year Citi had a tier one common capital ratio of 11.7 per cent, the sixth highest of the 19 banks under review. And its projected loan losses as a percentage of assets under the Fed’s stress scenario were broadly in line with relevant peers in all lending categories, save two.

Those two deserve much closer scrutiny. In the first, industrial and commercial loans, Citi scored a loss rate of 11 per cent of balances under stress conditions (table 4) in spite of the fact that 85 per cent of its loans in that category are investment grade. That is a higher quality loan book than many of the smaller banks have, whose loss ratios came out lower. The second bucket of loans in which Citi fared much worse than peers was labelled “other commercial”. Roughly two-thirds of this $30bn-odd portfolio (as defined by the Fed) was overseas consumer loans, mostly in booming emerging markets. The stress scenario must have absolutely murdered these, although in reality retail credit losses in Asia, and in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, are lower or in line with North America. Sure, Latin American loss rates are higher, but the Fed did not even bother to model that part of the world.