The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

1. Citigroup Is Pleased to Announce...

It's an open secret in corporate America that when you have bad news, announce it late on a Friday night, the evening before a holiday, or -- better yet -- the Friday night before a long holiday weekend.

Citigroup C added a new wrinkle to this time-honored tradition this week by announcing the appointment of Vikram Pandit as the company's new CEO and Sir Win Bischoff as its new chairman via Business Wire at exactly 2:15 p.m. ET on Tuesday.

Now, 2:15 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Dec. 11, may sound like an innocuous time to the average beleaguered Citi shareholder. But it also just happened to be the same time the Federal Reserve was widely expected to announce the hotly anticipated results of its latest policy meeting. (What a doozy that was, but that's another story of institutional dumbness.)

Now, we're sure Citi is quite proud of its new chairman and CEO, accomplished gentlemen with impressive resumes and gobs of business acumen. Certainly there was no overt attempt by Citi's crack communication squad to bury the news that not only had the board chosen as CEO Pandit -- who has "never run a public company, let alone one as big and complex as Citigroup," as The New York Times put it -- but also promoted Bischoff, a man closely associated with the disastrous reign of former chair Chuck Prince and the Robert Rubin-led board of out-to-lunch pocket-liners, err... directors.

It couldn't possibly be true that the folks at Citi were a little embarrassed that the Pandit-Bischoff solution arose only when the firm's executive search team was forced to turn inward after being rebuked by a number of external candidates reportedly including former NYSE EuronextNYX CEO John Thain, who opted to replace CEO Stanley O'Neal at Merrill LynchMER, BlackRock'sBLK Larry Fink, Deutsche BankDB CEO Josef Ackermann, and Robert Willumstad, a former president at Citi and chairman of AIGAIG.

Still, it's hard to believe no one associated with one of the world's largest financial institutions was aware of the Fed's Dec. 11 meeting and typical announcement schedule. But on the odd chance the folks at Citi are totally unaware of the Fed's habits, they might want to familiarize themselves with the schedule of FOMC meetings through January 2009 -- just in case they ever have more news they couldn't possibly want to hide in the shadow of the U.S. central bank.

Dumb-O-Meter Score: 95. Citi shares fell 4.4% Tuesday after traders managed to get wind of the Pandit-Bischoff news and another 5.3% Wednesday after Pandit's former firm, Morgan Stanley, named Citi its "top short idea" of 2008. But don't feel too bad for Mr. Pandit, who "may not have gotten his options in stock priced yet," as Joe Capone of SMaRT Financial Partners quipped on TheStreet.com TV (watch video below).

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