One of the more gratifying moments so far this year – at least in the realm of high finance – was the decision last week by shareholders of Citigroup to reject a $15 million pay package for CEO Vikram Pandit. The shareholders vetoed the award since they believed there was too big a disconnect between Pandit’s pay and performance. As my colleague Christopher Matthews pointed out, Citi shares have plunged 80% under Pandit’s leadership. In 2011, Citi’s stock sunk 20% while the S&P 500 index jumped 6%. Now does that sound like a track record worthy of $15 million? The rebuke, though, is much more than comeuppance for another entitled CEO – more even than a blow to rampant corporate greed and excess in America. The revolt at Citi is a victory for capitalism, and a signal that, hopefully, more capitalism is on the way.
If there’s one thing this cantankerous nation can seem to agree on these days, it’s our hatred of too-big-to-fail banks and their well-compensated, if less-than-fearless, leaders. Likewise, the American media is rarely concordant, but they were unanimously gleeful at the news that Citi’s shareholders had voted against the banks decision to lavish its CEO, Vikram Pandit, [...]
One year after IBM’s Watson defeated two of the greatest champions in Jeopardy history, the supercomputer is taking a “job” on Wall Street helping banking giant Citigroup analyze data. It would be easy to chalk up Watson’s new gig as a publicity stunt for IBM and Citi, but the partnership is also a reminder of [...]
Just what banking industry needs – another scandal. The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that Canada’s Competition Bureau is investigating several multinational banks regarding allegations that traders attempted to manipulate a key benchmark interest rate that is used to set prices on a wide array of financial products from auto loans to corporate debt.
You can’t have a strong economy without strong banks. That’s why President Bush’s and, later, President Obama’s first attempts to save the economy from a deep recession were focused around bank bailouts. And the fact that the banks have remained weak, despite the government’s efforts, is one of the major reasons the economic recovery has [...]
There was a nice moment in today’s House hearing on reasons lenders aren’t more readily reducing principal as a part of loan modifications (despite evidence that principal reduction has the most shot of keeping homeowners current on their mortgage payments). CitiMortgage CEO Sanjiv Das basically thanked the government for inserting itself into the debate. “The government’s [...]
Back in October, I wrote that Citi was basically a big garage sale, willing to sell any part of the bank that wasn’t nailed down (they had already gotten rid of the nailed down stuff). At the time, the PR folk denied that most of Citi was up for sale. They said the bank had [...]
First Goldman Sachs reports earnings of $3.2 billion for the quarter. But then, a few minutes later, Citigroup tells the world that it sort of made a little money but also sort of lost a lot of money (that is, it reported net income of $101 million, but said that, after dividends to preferred shareholders [...]
