Recently, some media reported that during lunch with Buffett, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser revealed her latest round of personnel restructuring plan to the "stock god", and Buffett expressed support for her plan. According to a spokesperson for Berkshire Hathaway, a subsidiary of Buffett, Buffett and Van Jayne recently had lunch together, but the company refused to disclose further details about the conversation. In fact, Buffett is one of the shareholders of Citigroup, and as of September 2023, Berkshire Hathaway ranks among the top five shareholders of Citigroup.
On January 15th, Citigroup released its worst quarterly financial report in nearly 14 years and subsequently announced a large-scale layoff plan. According to the financial report, in the fourth quarter of 2023, Citigroup's revenue was $17.4 billion, a year-on-year decrease of 3%, and a net loss of $1.8 billion. Faced with losses, the company's CFO Mark Mason announced on the same day that he will lay off 20000 employees in the next two years.
Wall Street analysts say that currently, several large Wall Street banks, including Citigroup, have seen a significant decline in performance in the fourth quarter of 2023. One important reason is that the Federal Reserve Insurance Company charged about $8.6 billion in special fees to these banks, which had a significant impact on their profitability. Although many large banks have made early provisions to pay this special fee in order to get rid of its impact on future performance as soon as possible, this has led to a significant decline in their recent performance.