Duff McDonald stilettoes
Chuck Prince in this week’s New York, just in time for Citi’s dreadful
earnings. McDonald says that Prince’s CEOship has been "a nightmare"
since shortly after he got the top job, largely because he "regularly violated
a cardinal rule of Wall Street etiquette—he has repeatedly made promises
he has not kept."
McDonald also says that Prince can’t even manage his own senior executives:
Prince is said to have brought a level of distrust into the executive suite
that far exceeds that which existed under Weill, a man who, it should be noted,
threw his own protégé, Jamie Dimon, overboard in a fit of pique.
Can Prince’s job really be safe? Jim Cramer says he’s
out, this week. That would be music to the ears of Deutsche Bank’s Mike
Mayo, who obviously had no interest in trying to get real information out of
Prince when it was his turn to ask questions on Citi’s earnings conference call.
Instead, he just unleashed a series of hard-hitting
punches:
Chuck said this was the year of no excuses. You guys say the results are
disappointing. So what are the repercussions at the level of the office of
the Chairman?…
One of your main targets for this year was to grow revenues faster than expenses;
and that is not going to pan out. This could be the third year in a row where
that doesn’t pan out…
The addition to responsibilities of the risk management head three weeks before
the preannouncement?
Mayo finished off, essentiallly, by asking Prince whether he really thought
he was going to be around for much longer.
In terms of the Five
Levels of CEO Hell, I’d say that Prince has fallen from Level 3 to Level
2 at this point. How much longer until there’s an InTrade contract on Prince’s
successor?