Courtesy of Pam Martens
Robert Rubin, Former Treasury Secretary and Chair of the Citigroup Executive Committee for Almost a Decade
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, has decided he wants to rewrite his resume, removing the ugly warts from his days at Citigroup. That mega bank started as a financial supermarket that Rubin helped to make possible behind the scenes in the Bill Clinton administration, followed by a giant crash and the largest bank bailout in U.S. history from 2007 to 2010. Rubin strolled out the door of Citigroup in early 2009 $120 million richer than when he originally rolled his shopping cart into the well-stocked aisles of hubris at Citigroup almost a decade earlier.
The New York Times has apparently decided to help Rubin exorcise Citigroup from his past. In an OpEd in the New York Times New York edition today, neither he nor the New York Times in its bio mentions so much as a syllable about Rubin’s infamous tenure at Citigroup. The uninformed reader would assume that Rubin is a veteran of Goldman Sachs and a former U.S. Treasury Secretary and there’s nothing more to see here.
But there’s plenty that the public needs to remember about Rubin and Citigroup –and that history makes the thrust of Rubin’s OpEd akin to a Saturday Night Live satire.
Rubin’s curious point in the OpEd is that it wasn’t “courses in economics or finance” from his days at Harvard that prepared him “for working at Goldman Sachs and in the government” (notice the almost decade-long stretch at Citigroup is completely missing) but instead “the key was Professor Demos’s philosophy course and the conversations about existentialism in coffee shops around campus.”
The shareholders of Citigroup who are still nursing stock losses of 85 percent from the bank’s pre-crash days aren’t going to be too comforted by reading about Rubin’s musings about existentialism in coffee shops around Harvard when he should have been cramming for finance courses that might have led to his questioning the more than $1 trillion bucks that Citigroup held off its balance sheet in the leadup to its crash.
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