So much exciting stuff going down at Citi this week. Charlie “No Sleeves” Gasparino reports that on Tuesday, the bank will unveil its genius plan to write-off $24 billion and lay off 20,000 employees. Some might even be canned as early as this afternoon. Do you sense you might be in that enviable position of no longer having to tell people you work at Citigroup? Got any idea what the severance might be like? Let us know. Thinking about choreographing some sort of performance piece in reaction to the news? Let us know. Considering that China made the first in a three-part series of phone calls over the weekend to say it doesn’t want to be seen with Citi (Bear Stearns, sure, no prob), capital that Pandit was apparently banking on in order to keep layoffs “to a minimum,” you should probably all be coming up with something. Prince Alwaleed, who is less invested in Citi for the money than for the hilarity of it all, is expected to hand over a few unmarked twenties to keep things cool, though insiders say that with the mood he’s in RE: the Loverboy/Foreigner/Night Ranger tour being cancelled, nothing is certain. (If you listen carefully, you can here a Saudi accent in the background vocals for Sister Christian. Very crisp "t" pronunciation.)
On the bright side, Citi has given us a datapoint in the "write down per employee" value that reigns on the street 1,200,000 per employee, apparently). Now you can calculate J.P. Morgan and UBS layoffs as easy as a few HP-12C keypresses. That, my friends, is news you can use.
Citi Could Write Down Up to $24 Billion [CNBC]
China's Government Could Hamper Citigroup's Plans to Raise Capital [WSJ]
Posted by , Jan 14, 2008 11:18AM
my sales contact over at Citi said the bulk of the layoffs may not go down until Wednesday, although the fact that he was drunk and weeping softly at the time does not, admittedly, lend much credence to his account...