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Prince, a lawyer, became Citigroup CEO in 2003 largely on the strength of his skill in resolving these legal hassles. But he led Citi smack into the next big financial scandal: subprime-mortgage lending. Over the past five years, Citi went from also-ran to leading issuer of the CDOs that take subprime mortgages or other loans and reprocess them into purportedly low-risk securities. Market jitters and ratings-agency downgrades have sent CDOs into a free fall--and now the banks have to account for the losses...
Merrill Lynch, which has also lost a lot of money and a CEO lately, followed a similar path. But Merrill at least began pulling back this year. Not Citi. "As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance," Prince told the Financial Times in July in a quote that will follow him to his grave. "We're still dancing...
...music stopped for good the day Prince resigned, when Citi announced that it had $55 billion in subprime-related securities, mostly CDOs, still on the books. It also disclosed that it's holding almost $135 billion in securities for which there are no observable market prices--meaning that their valuation is determined by guesstimation--and is involved with another $167 billion in off-the-books CDOs and special investment vehicles. The normally mild-mannered stock and credit analysts who follow the firm reacted with downgrades and criticism--their main complaint being that Citi had been so slow in fessing...
...know when management is lying?" began a favorite saying of Sallie Krawcheck, one of the top securities-industry analysts of the 1990s. "Their lips are moving." Now Krawcheck runs Citi's wealth-management division, a bright spot in the most recent earnings report, and she's a dark-horse contender for the top job. Rubin, already known for the cryptic nature of his utterances at Treasury, seems to have taken her words to heart, letting little slip in public...
...that figuring out how to restore Citi's luster in the face of a halting economy has left him speechless. After 15 years of mostly flush times and five of downright bingeing, the business of lending may have run into a wall, at least in the U.S. Household debt grew almost three times faster than income from 2000 to 2006. Now the country appears to be tapped out, and a recession may result. Neither of those things is good news for Citigroup...