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Every day, it seems, Citigroup
faces another
round of
questions. They don't beat around the bush, either:
-
What is your plan to turn the business around?
-
Do you have a plan?
-
Is anyone really in charge?
-
Do you have the time (and the means) to
provide the on-the-job-training that your new, inexperienced CEO will
undoubtedly need?
That the biggest bank in the country is even being
asked questions like this says a lot more about the sorry state of Citigroup and
its “strategy” than any answers that might be forthcoming in coming weeks. I’m
sure that Vikram Pandit is a decent, hardworking fellow, but (as
I’ve mentioned
before) the plain fact is that his experience in the banking business is so
slight that he’d have trouble getting approval from regulators to run a single
Citibank branch, let alone the entire company. Yet regulators seem to have no
problem with the crew that the board has put in place to run Citigroup now.
It’s crazy. Some members of Citi’s top management,
remember, are the same people who got the company in the mess it’s in in the
first place. Others—including the CEO--have basically no experience in the
banking business whatsoever.
And yet investors are being asked to believe that
this is the team that can turn around what must be the biggest, most
dysfunctional financial services company on the planet.
Please. If this were the board of a community
bank, it would have been ousted long ago.
Where is the Board?
Citi is too important to the industry and the
economy for questions about its strategy to remain unanswered much longer. I’m
looking to seeing the plan that Pandit & Co. come up with. But I must admit I’m
not hopeful.
What do you think? Let me know!
/VWH/
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