What Sheila Bair Really Thinks About Wall Street CEOs
It took an angry call from Bair to Warren Buffett to get Blankfein to start playing team ball with the FDIC. Lloyd called her back within the hour.
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UPDATE: A look at Sheila's thoughts on Vikram Pandit, who was fired earlier today.
Wall Street Journal
Former FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair’s new book, Bull by the Horns on her time during the financial crisis is out, and it’s juicy. Here’s a quick look at what she had to say about some of the country’s top bankers.
On Vikram Pandit
It's pretty well known that Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit and Bair are not best friends. Bair’s book gives a deeper dive into her less than fuzzy feelings for him.
“The selection of Pandit simply reaffirmed that Citi was no longer a bread-and-butter commercial bank. It had been hijacked by an investment banking culture that made profits through high-stakes betting on the direction of the markets” as opposed to making prudent loans, she writes. She thought Citi needed a more traditional banker to fix the mess it had gotten itself into, but Pandit “wouldn’t have known how to underwrite a loan if his life depended on it.”
She writes that Citi’s board could have “done so much better than Pandit.”
She also hammers Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner repeatedly for his attempts, in Bair’s view, to shovel government money at Citi rather than subject them to harsher medicine. “Tim seemed to view his job as protecting Citigroup from me, when he should have been worried about protecting the taxpayers from Citi. … The public justifiably wanted retribution. Citi should have been led to the pillory,” she writes.
On Lloyd Blankfein
After initially being peeved at Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein for not bidding on failing banks, Bair describes him as helping the FDIC secure investments from other big banks – as well as ponying up his own – for faltering ShoreBank Corp. of Chicago, a 1970s-era pioneer in lending to low- and middle-income neighborhoods.
Blankfein’s help was apparently sparked by a call Bair made “in a snit” to Warren Buffett, who had earlier invested in Goldman. “I was probably out of line, but I told him I was frustrated with Goldman’s complete lack of interest in helping us capitalize failing institutions” despite the fact Goldman benefited from being able to become a bank holding company during the crisis.
Blankfein was calling with an offer to help within the hour.
Oct 9, 2012 at 4:08 PM
Reader Comments (12)
But no one--not Bair, not Barofsky, no one, not humanly possible--will ever top Jimmy Cayne's rant about Tim Geithner. I'm going to post it here as a reminder of the high fecal standard indelibly set by Mr. Cayne:
"The audacity of that prick in front of the American people announcing he was deciding whether or not a firm of this stature and this whatever was good enough to get a loan," he said. "Like he was the determining factor, and it's like a flea on his back, floating down underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, getting a handjob, saying, "Raise the bridge." This guy thinks he's got a big dick. He’s got nothing, except maybe a boyfriend. I'm not a good enemy. I'm a very bad enemy. But certain things really—that bothered me plenty. It's just that for some clerk to make a decision based on what, your own personal feeling about whether or not they're a good credit? Who the fuck asked you? You're not an elected officer. You're a clerk. Believe me, you're a clerk. I want to open up on this fucker, that's all I can tell you."
Speaking of insider trash talk, apparently Paul Ryan refers to Mitt Romney as "Stench." While that of course pales in comparison to Cayne-speak, it's hard to get any more "inside" than the Veep candidate's pet name for his boss.
http://www.theweek.co.uk/us/us-election-2012/49235/has-paul-ryan-been-calling-mitt-romney-stench
Could it get any more humiliating for the most pathetic excuse ever for a presidential candidate? We can only hope.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-26/politico-s-paul-ryan-satire-the-joke-s-on-them.html
And as for Jimmy Cayne and Geithner, here ya go:
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2009/03/04/bear-stearns-jimmy-caynes-profane-tirade-against-treasurys-geithner/
And read this for a story from Bess Levin about Cayne keeping chronic in his CEO desk drawer for special occasions, as in smoking every day while running Bear Stearns.
http://dailybail.com/home/flashback-financial-crisis-hearings-testimony-from-ex-bear-s.html
http://daskrap.com/2012/9/ross-perot-last-american-leftist
This is a great read.
http://dailybail.com/home/what-good-is-wall-street.html
http://dailybail.com/home/jim-cramer-erin-burnett-repeatedly-stab-a-vikram-pandit-vood.html
http://dailybail.com/home/chris-whalen-on-vikram-pandits-huge-new-pay-package-at-baile.html
http://dailybail.com/home/want-to-talk-to-vikram-pandit-ceo-of-citigroup-heres-his-cel.html
http://dailybail.com/home/geithner-rubin-stopped-bair-from-firing-vikram-pandit.html
http://dailybail.com/home/bloombergs-jonathan-weil-citis-vikram-pandit-may-have-violat.html
http://dailybail.com/home/vikram-pandit-with-charlie-rose.html
http://dailybail.com/home/keith-olbermann-proposal-the-punish-vikram-pandit-act-of-200.html