November 8, 2007
Sadly, it pays to retire disgracefully
Column on the Financial Times comment page
On Wall Street, retirement is the new resignation.
This week, Chuck Prince “retired” as chairman and chief executive of Citigroup just before he would have been pushed. As it announced his departure, Citi said it could take a further writedown of up to $11bn due to the credit squeeze.
The week before, Stan O’Neal “retired” from Merrill Lynch as it announced a multi-billion writedown, the price of its push into risk-taking under his leadership.
The only Wall Street chief executive due for the chop who has not retired is the one who has actually reached retirement age – 73-year-old Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns.
Continue reading this column here. Post comments below.
Yes you beat up on some financial sector dancers like Citibank’s Chuck Prince but keep mum about those composers who in Basel wrote the score of the “minimum capital requirements”; and picked the conductors and the musicians, the credit rating agencies, who performed the music to which the bankers were ordered to dance.
As much as I object the generous severance checks to the dancers more do I object that our bank regulators are not held accountable and are now almost expected to dig deeper in the hole we find ourselves and which can only lead to even wilder dancing.
Posted by: Per Kurowski | November 15th, 2007 at 4:18 pm | Report this comment