"History is a wonderful thing, if only it was true"
-Tolstoy

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Wait a min...

I thought the whole Wall St. Mess was all Bush's fault

Loosen regulation
Encourage a major institution to step up risky trading in mortgage-related instruments?

And by the way, take some $126 million in pay and bonus's

Rubin Leaving Citigroup:

"For Mr. Rubin, his resignation is a sobering turn in a sterling career in Washington and on Wall Street. Since joining Citigroup in 1999 as an adviser to the bank’s senior executives, Mr. Rubin, 70, who is an economic adviser on the transition team of President-elect Barack Obama, has sat atop a bank that has made one misstep after another.

When he was Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, Mr. Rubin helped loosen Depression-era banking regulations that made the creation of Citigroup possible. During the same period, he helped beat back tighter oversight of exotic financial products, a development he had previously said he was helpless to prevent.

In his capacity as a senior adviser to Citigroup’s top executives and board, he pushed hard for the bank to step up its trading of risky mortgage-related securities and other complex investments as long as it improved oversight — a strategy critics say sowed the seeds of the bank’s current troubles. Mr. Rubin, whose contract specifically absolved him from daily operational responsibilities, has maintained that he could not have foreseen the current mess."

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