“When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing,” he said in an interview with the FT in Japan.....

Rory, Limerick, Ireland

I am a former Citi employee who has seen a great company get choked from the inside. Ever since Mr. Prince took over, there has been a greater push for centralization, which has created a nightmare only parralled by the US internal revenue service.

To give you an example, a colleage of mine requested a simple 7% raise to keep up with inflation and area cost of living, or he would have to look for another job. He has been hired in well below the average for the position. Citi said no, the employee was only elligible for a 3% merrit increase, so my friend left. Later we learned that they replaced my friend with a less experienced employee from outside the company but for 50% more pay, and they were able to do it because it was an outside the company hire...even know it was more expensive to do so.

The manager's had no flexability to retain experienced people even know it was cheaper to do so...as you can see, it not a surprise Citi is having such difficulty.

Travers, Dallas, USA

We are not going to shed a lot of tears for those city whiz kids who have been paid bonuses of millions of pounds annually for many years. They have been buying up a lot of expensive properties all around the country only to make owing a house or a flat an impossible dream for a large number of people. It is time they learned that no job is secured for life these days and if they have blown all their money while the going was good then they have only got themselves to blame because what they used to get paid in a year was much more than most ordinary worker can earn in their entire working lives!

Wing, Poole, UK

This is just another example of big business putting profits before employees mainly to make the CEO look good ....where do we expect these 17,000 jobs to be replaced in the market? It is crucial that we all ensure our skills are diversified and we have career plans in place as no job is safe at any company in any industry. This is the advice I provide my clients who are in the same situation as those 17,000 at Citi.

Daryl Close, London,

Citigroup ought to be congratulated on their honesty in coming clean. But the numbers stated only refer to what they have left on their books, the question that is not getting answered is : "How many pension funds and investment vehicles around the world and more specifically in the UK are sitting on hundred of billions if not trillions of worthless securitised debt paper sold by the banks to them"?
And when the lawyers have finished how much provision will the banks need to put aside against the claims that will be firing at them from everywhere.
The fall out will take years to address and we will all be paying a penalty for the greed of the few.
Before any of the major banks and investment banks intend to pay out any bonuses from the top down they had better be pretty clear that their solvency requirements allow them to do that as the Regulators will be crawling over them now to try to make up for their incompetance.

Robert D Marshall, London, UK