...Obama’s stern rhetoric apparently did not move the top banking honchos who failed to show up for this week’s White House meeting with the president. The heads of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley waited until the morning of the Monday meeting to catch a plane and then claimed that fog prevented their journey.
Citigroup Chief Executive Vikram S. Pandit couldn’t make the meeting with the president who had saved his corporation from bankruptcy because he was too busy lining up new private financing to allow Citigroup to escape the bonus confines and other limits stipulated by the government bailout program.
No bank bears greater responsibility for the economic debacle that has caused such worldwide suffering than Citigroup, whose immense growth was made possible by legislation that Summers and his then-mentor, Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, successfully promoted in the late 1990s. Rubin was rewarded for his efforts with a top job at Citigroup, which was formed from one of the largest mergers in history and which paid him $120 million before its fortunes plummeted. The bank is by no means out of the swamp of its own creation, as it still holds a huge portfolio of toxic assets, is still sustained by substantial public assistance and was trading Tuesday at less than $4 a share—a tiny fraction of its value before Rubin led it astray.
It was Rubin, as an Obama adviser, who pushed for Pandit’s selection as head of Citigroup. Perhaps Obama could enlist Rubin’s aid in getting Pandit to accept the president’s invitations to the White House. But of course there is no expectation of getting Rubin and Pandit to pay back the bankrupted homeowners they swindled.
Meanwhile, it is still Joe Lieberman's country.
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