Summer in the Citi

I don’t know how I missed this, but it seems Citigroup, which has proved itself again & again on both a micro and a macro level to be incapable of managing its way out of a paper bag, is at it again.

Restricted in the ability to hand out obscene bonuses to employees accustomed to receiving them—restricted because they took massive amounts of TARP money to bail their bespoke-clad asses out of collapse—they’ve announced that, well, they’ll just raise base salaries to these exceedingly valuable employees…by up to 50%.

It’s the same old wheeze—have to do something to retain the best and the brightest if we want to survive, blah, blah, blah.

What I just don’t get is: if these are the best and the brightest you’ve got, and they’re the very ones who maneuvered you into collapse, isn’t it time to bring in the JVs, who might actually still be capable of grasping the concept that you’re supposed to be doing something to add actual, you know, value to something besides your own bank accounts? Like, here’s a thought, your customers and your shareholders?

What this just proves is that the obvious and immutable goal of these organizations is to perpetuate their own existence and their own greed. Everything else is a massive joke they’re playing on the rest of the world, whom they (apparently rightly) regard as nothing but suckers.