We wonder… when Citigroup’s chief economist was looking for a condo, did he ask his broker: “Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go?”
And did the broker reply: “that depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
That’s the Carroll quote that Willem Buiter started his attention-grabbing paper Alice in Euroland with. Why not his house hunt? Read More
In the end, U.S. stock markets decided to heed the storm.
The New York Stock Exchange had planned to open trading electronically while shuttering its physical trading floor. “We are open for business and at the same time acting in accordance with actions taken by the city and state of New York,” said NYSE CEO Duncan L. Niederauer said in a release yesterday afternoon.
But NYSE reversed course last night, announcing it would halt operations completely. The exchange is closed today, and may close tomorrow, “pending confirmation,” according to a release.
Nasdaq is also closed today; “it is likely that the markets will be closed” tomorrow, the exchange said in a release.
Bond markets will open, but the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association recommended that markets close at noon today. Read More
We’re not sure that anyone ever believed that Vikram Pandit was acting purely of his own volition when he stepped down as chief executive officer of Citigroup earlier this month, whatever Mr. Pandit or Citi Chairman Mike O’Neill said—now there’s less reason to believe the official account of Mr. Pandit’s departure.
According to Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Susanne Craig at The New York Times, Mr. Pandit met with Mr. O’Neill on the day before he resigned, and presented with a choice between three already prepared news releases: Read More
Politico got its hands on a copy of Greg Smith’s Why I Left Goldman Sachs, and published some excerpts yesterday. There’s an allegation that the bank advised clients to buy and sell stock options on European banks amid the region’s ongoing debt crisis, so that the firm could profit by taking the other side Read More
Citigroup announced that chief executive officer Vikram Pandit was stepping down today. So the “king” is dead, or you know, getting ready for a little vacation. That doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t speculate to what did him in.
1. We can buy what Mr. Pandit is selling (though no one really is). Read More
Vikram Pandit is stepping down as chief executive officer of Citigroup, and the executive who divested the bank’s toxic assets in the wake of the financial crisis is moving into the bank’s top job.
Citi said in a statement today that Mr. Pandit was resigning and that Michael Corbat, Citi’s head for Middle East Read More
There was a funny thing that happened this summer, which is that Mr. Universal Banker Sandy Weill went on CNBC and said that the supermarket model of banking that he pioneered was a good idea at the time but no longer the correct thing, and everyone who was anybody weighed in on the Read More
Last month, we noted that former FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair had some choice words regarding Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit in her new book, Bull By the Horns. After Citi said he was stepping down in a statement released today, Ms. Bair offered six more words to her assessment:
“This was a very positive move,” she said in an interview with Tom Keene and Ken Prewitt on Bloomberg Radio.
You can read her comments on Mr. Pandit from her book below. Read More
So the buck stops … here? After technical glitches at Nasdaq on the day of Facebook’s initial public offering cost market makers millions of dollars, a pattern emerged. Nasdaq would offer to make good on some part of the losses, the market makers would grumble that said offer was unsatisfactory, and Nasdaq would come back with something a little bit better. Read More
Morgan Stanley is going to win out over Citigroup when a mediator places a value on the Morgan Stanley Smith Barney brokerage, The New York Post reports. The two banks have disputed the value of the joint venture: Morgan Stanley, which owns 51 percent of the brokerage and plans to acquire remaining shares, said the Read More
