Wall Street & Markets

The NYT home page currently features this headline:

Geithner Says China Is Manipulating Its Currency

and this subhead:

Timothy F. Geithner’s comment is certain to anger the Chinese government and raise fears that it could sell off some of its huge reserves of dollars.

If China has been manipulating its currency, it has been doing so by …

As Wall Streeters go, John Thain had done a pretty impressive job of maintaining his reputation amid the financial carnage of the past couple years. But I’m starting to wonder if any of the Wall Street establishment is going to come out of this mess looking even remotely respectable.

Thain had risen through the ranks at Goldman Sachs. …

My new column is online and in the issue of TIME with some guy flubbing his oath of office on the cover. It begins:

City Bank of New York was founded in 1812 by a group of merchants hoping to fill the void left by the demise of the first Bank of the United States, the sort-of central bank whose charter Congress had allowed to expire the

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From the prologue to Phillip L. Zweig’s Wriston: Walter Wriston, Citibank, and the Rise and Fall of American Financial Supremacy (1995):

To bring Citicorp back from the brink in the face of endless criticism, John Reed drew on the capacity for pain he had tapped into as chief of the once-troubled consumer business. As the board mulled

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Roger Ehrenberg thinks it’s long past time for Treasury to bite the bullet on Citi:

What if, just what if, Treasury (together with the SEC) had said four months ago – game over, guys. Employ FAS 157 across your asset portfolios, show us exactly how broke you are, hand us the keys, we’ll settle accounts with those who are owed money and

…

A couple of commenters have pointed me to Robert Reich’s list of “Criteria for TARP II.” Nos. 3-6 seem the most important:

3. Prohibit any bank that gets TARP II funds from issuing dividends, purchasing other companies, or paying off creditors.

4. Bar any bank that gets TARP II funds from paying its executives, traders, or directors

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John Reed, who as CEO of Citicorp merged it with Sandy Weill’s Travelers Group just over a decade ago, admitted it last spring, telling the Financial Times that “the specific merger transaction clearly has to be seen to have been a mistake.” Now current Citi CEO Vikram Pandit—who has been talking to Reed on a pretty regular basis—has …

I’ve been bothered for a while by all the criticism of the banks for “hoarding” the $300+ billion we taxpayers have given them rather than lending it right back out again. But I haven’t been able to articulate the counterargument. Happily Jack “The Mortgage Professor” Guttentag has at least partially done it for me. An excerpt:

The

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This had been in the cards for a few months, but now it’s official: Bob Rubin is leaving Citigroup. He joined up in 1999 after a spectacularly successful stint as Treasury Secretary. His presence was supposed to smooth the troubled relationship between the two heads of the just-merged company, John Reed (Citi) and Sandy Weill …