Tim’s weekly essays are starting to feel like a writing residency at the Do Nothing Academy. They are long, polished, and utterly detached from the five-alarm dumpster fire smoldering below. Morale is circling the drain, bureaucracy is metastasizing, and the tech stack looks like it was assembled during a drunken episode of MacGyver using expired vendor contracts and sheer delusion.
His “rip the band aid” initiatives are more like surprise amputations with a butter kn--e. The org chart now looks like spaghetti, with contractors everywhere, nobody managing them, and everyone seemingly reporting to someone who may not exist. Meanwhile, leadership has become performance art where PowerPoint flair and strategic vagueness get rewarded while every actual problem rots quietly in the corner.
To help steer this ship further into the rocks, Tim has summoned a battalion of consulting minions from PwC. Their combined operational experience would not qualify them to run a newspaper stand, but they have mastered the art of charging seven figures to rename common sense as “strategic frameworks.” None of them have ever built or operated anything, but they are here to restructure everything.
Now enter Lofty, our Brit in New York with two things on his mind: rapid ascent and rapid headcount cuts. AI is just the costume. The real strategy is to prune teams like a blind gardener in a windstorm, inflate KPIs, and vanish before the debris lands. If he plays it right, he will walk away richer than a Premier League striker with a Manhattan tax advisor.
Tim, for his part, is milking the two years he has like a cow that wandered into a boardroom. Cut costs, pad the bonus, and vanish into an “advisor” role so vague it could be a myth.
Meanwhile, Citi continues its greatest hits tour of self-inflicted wounds. The regulatory consent orders are still very much alive, with follow-up fines rolling in because nothing meaningful ever got fixed. Systems keep misfiring in ways that make headlines. One fat-fingered error nearly moved eighty-one trillion dollars. Eighty-one. Trillion. But rest assured, it was caught in time and nobody in senior management was inconvenienced.
Bonuses continue, naturally, based on vague indicators like momentum and “tone at the top,” which may be corporate speak for “we still like each other in meetings.”
One solid market wobble and this whole setup collapses like a finance intern after a three-can Red Bull lunch. Would you bank here? Would you even plug in your phone here?
We are not fixing anything. We are narrating the descent while applauding the choreography.
An excellent post from @ah+1jxjy0t77.