Pandit’s Gambit: Bad for Business - Good for Baseball?

It’s Sunday night as I write this post and I am taking stock of the things I did this weekend. While the last two days were jam packed with birthday parties and barbecues, the following is a list of seven things I didn’t do this weekend;

Fire or plan to fire more than 6000 people
Lose $2.5 billion in the last three months
Take $11.7 billion in write downs tied to the mortgage abortion
Give my shareholders their company’s lowest stock price since 1998
Spend $400 million for the naming rights to the new Mets stadium
Piss off former Citigroup employees who are Mets fans
Piss off Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud, one of my largest shareholders for the last twenty years

That’s right home gamers, Vikram Pandit, the embattled (French for about get canned) CEO of the world’s largest financial institution has been a busy little beaver trying to put lipstick on this pig of a stock since Citi paid $600 million to buy his hedge fund and bring him on board. Since then, he has made one bad move after another. The latest mess he has gotten himself in is #5 or, ‘I’ll take spending shareholder’s money frivolously for $400 million Alex.’

Why?

Because this deal was dumb and someone in his PR department should have squashed it. Does he really need to spread the gospel of Citigroup this way right now? I mean really, is anyone left in New York that doesn’t know who Citigroup is? For the love of Pete Starbucks makes fun of the number of branches Citigroup has in Manhattan!

Now Mr. Pandit, I understand you have a business to run and another 350,000 employees to feed. But someday (soon) when your career at Citigroup is over, you are going to reflect back on the ef up’s that caused the board to chase you out of town like crazed villagers with pitchforks, and this stadium deal has to rank right up there.

Why?

Because ten years from now this isn’t going to matter, but right here, right now, you’ve unwittingly upset, insulted, and pissed off a lot of people by taking $7.5 billion in cash from Abu Dhabi to cover your ass on the mortgage mess, then turn around and piss away $400 million of it to see your logo in lights on yet another building.

Yeah, I can see it now, they are going to write books about you, they might even teach a class at the Wharton school on how to take an international banking instituion, run it like a hedge fund straight into the ground, then parachute out unscathed. We’ll call it “Pandit’s Gambit.”