If you go to around the 21 minute mark in this video you see Charllie Rose asking whether "risk management" at Citigroup should have foreseen the risks in the US housing market. Vikram Pandit demonstrates that he is an overpaid master of sleaze by dancing around this question without answering it. He excuses the company from any fault. This is a pretty disgusting exhibition.
What is salt in the wound for me is the following article by Eric Dash in the International Herald Tribune:
Vikram Pandit was paid more than that for taking over as chief executive of the embattled bank. Pandit received about $165.2 million in connection with the sale of Old Lane Partners, the investment firm that Citigroup bought last April for as much as $800 million to lure him to the company.
He received an additional $2.7 million in annual pay in the roughly six months he led Citigroup's investment bank and alternative investments group.And in January, Pandit was given a sign-on grant of stock and performance-based options worth more than $48 million, though the options have no cash value. That brings the total to at least $216 million.
In short, this guy was paid an obscene amount of money to put a "new face" on Citigroup. Meanwhile he continues the legacy of lies and deception. Worse, he appears to have drunk the Kool-Aid of a "risk management" process that couldn't foresee that a bubble in house prices might lead to a crash. You pay $200+ million for a guy who doesn't understand that bubbles will crash? You put in charge a guy who seems blindly willing to repeat mistakes of the past? This is the "best that money can buy"? What a load of horse manure. This guy is just another in a long line of sleaze masters who rake in the dough to hold positions where they use dodgy techniques to extract money out of customers (and now the US taxpayer) and move it into his own pocket and the coterie of "management" buddies at Citigroup. Sick.
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