Robert Rubin: What meltdown?
In a talk on Wednesday, the Citigroup director said the current financial upheaval is just cyclical. And none of the blame that there was to assign went to Wall Street.
CNN Money
January 31, 2008
A lending catastrophe has consumed homeowners, mortgage companies, and the financial system, but Robert Rubin, Citigroup's director and executive committee chair, doesn't seem particularly alarmed.
He told a small crowd at Manhattan's Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art Wednesday that the problems now roiling the markets and forcing the Federal Reserve into a defensive posture are "all part of a cycle of periodic excess leading to periodic disruption," and that we are not in fact on the verge of a financial meltdown.
And the economic problems that he did acknowledge were blamed on just about everyone but the major U.S. financial players.
Rubin's remarks seemed glib given that the financial world looks very much ready to melt down. To wit: Standard & Poor's issued a report, also Wednesday, saying that financial institutions -including credit unions and some Asian banks - could lose more than $265 billion as a result of subprime mortgage contagion, up from an earlier estimated $130 billion.
Rubin has been a director and chair of Citigroup's (C, Fortune 500) executive committee since 1999, overseeing a period during which the bank took on huge risks that it is paying dearly for now. He didn't talk about Citi, but when asked he defended both former chief executive Charles Prince and the decision to replace him with Vikram Pandit.
Please read the entire article at:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/31/news/economy/rubin_benner.fortune/---------------------------------------
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