Should top banks sell assets?

Citi seems to be in sell-good-assets mode, though its unclear what beyond Smith Barney is on the block. Is this a good idea for other banks, notably Bank of America? Analyst Meredith Whitney seems to think so. "That's what people like you and me, what taxpayers have to do when we are in financial distress. We have to sell whatever it is we can, which is almost always our best assets, and deal with it. We can't just sell what we want to, which would of course be our bad stuff," she tells Fortune.

Selling bad assets to a massive "bad bank" isn't really the whole solution. They need to shrink, as their markets shrink. The ambitions of old really don't jive with market reality. 

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