15 December 2008

Keep Robert Rubin away from decision making of any kind

I should think that this, from Frank Rich's column in yesterday's Times, would be sufficient reason for Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to be permanently excluded from consideration for any government post, not to mention any significant management post anywhere:

...if all bubbles and panics are alike, this one, the worst since the Great Depression, also carried the DNA of our own time. Enron had been a Citigroup client. In a now-forgotten footnote to that scandal, Rubin was discovered to have made a phone call to a former colleague in the Treasury Department to float the idea of asking credit-rating agencies to delay downgrading Enron’s debt. This inappropriate lobbying never went anywhere, but Rubin neither apologized nor learned any lessons. “I can see why that call might be questioned,” he wrote in his 2003 memoir, “but I would make it again.” He would say the same this year about his performance at Citigroup during its collapse.

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