He calls it like it is. And buys condos in the Aldyn.

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?

We're still waiting to hear back from Mr. Buiter so we can ask him ourselves, but when it came to negotiating a price, everyone's favorite economist provocateur did not disappoint. Mr. Willem and wife Anne (who also has an economics PhD) finagled a $100,000 discount on his four-bedroom, 4.5-bath condo at 60 Riverside Boulevard.

Symbolic? The Aldyn faces West, away from Europe.

City records show that the Buiters paid $4.35 for the 2,505-square foot sponsor unit in Extell's Aldyn, a deal brokered by Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group.

Naturally, Citigroup's chief economist eschewed the established enclaves around Central Park for something a little more iconoclastic—the far West Side.

As he told The Wall Street Journal, "I like saying things that drive people around the bend."

You know what else Mr. Buiter likes (besides researching monetary unions)? Glass-walled great rooms with Brazilian cherry floors, marble chef blocks and teak-wrapped master baths with Zuma deep soaking tubs. Also: custom-crackle porcelain tile, views of the George Washington bridge and condo towers with rock climbing walls and bowling alleys.

Mr. Buiter's blunt pronouncements on the Eurozone have given him something of a cult-like following in the finance world. Will his acolytes join him on the banks of the Hudson River?

kvelsey@observer.com

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.

Wall Street firms, meanwhile, have been asking nonessential staff to work from home. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan and American Express are among firms to close buildings in evacuation zone A in downtown Manhattan. From a Citigroup memo published by The Times:

All staff based in Citi facilities within mandatory evacuation zones must invoke their work-from-home strategies for Monday and Tuesday unless they are in business-critical roles that have established alternative work locations. Other Citi facilities outside of mandatory evacuation zones should be accessible for critical personnel only; non-critical personnel should invoke their work-from-home strategies.

World Economic Forum/Alexandre Campbell

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:

One stated that Mr. Pandit had resigned, effective immediately. Another that he would resign, effective at the end of the year. The third release stated Mr. Pandit had been fired without cause. The choice was his. The abrupt encounter, described by three people briefed on the conversation, included a terse comment by the chairman, Michael E. O’Neill: “The board has lost confidence in you.”

Mr. Pandit, as we know, "chose" to resign immediately. "After five extraordinary years, I have decided to step down as CEO of Citi," he wrote in a memo distributed to Citi employees. "Given the progress we have made in the last few years, I have concluded that now is the right time for someone else to take the helm at Citigroup," he said in a press release announcing his "decision."

And Mr. O'Neill answered:

"Well let me start with pay. The answer to that is categorically no. Our statement is clear, Mike. Vikram offered his resignation, and the Board accepted it. Again, we have been engaged in a process for a little over two years. CEO succession is a critical part of any bank’s, or any company's for that matter, governance process. And I think we built a rather robust one. So I am proud of what we have done. And we were very well-prepared when this occurred. So I don't think there is an issue as it relates to governance. I think we were there, and we are delighted to have Mike in the seat."

At Business Insider, Henry Blodget is scandalized by Citi's "huge lie by omission," and he has every reason to be: If the Times account is true, the bank withheld from shareholders material information about the firm.

But reading The Times' account, it's not hard to understand why Mr. O'Neill chose a path of omission, given his behind-the-scenes machinations to gain board support for a move:

By August, the chairman had the support of at least a handful of board members, including Diana Taylor. Some directors felt that Mr. Pandit had left them out of the loop at times.

Mr. O’Neill continued to build his case for a leadership change in individual meetings, according to several people familiar with the discussions. He chose to meet with the board members most loyal to Mr. Pandit last. In some of these discussions, he told the board members that the decision to replace Mr. Pandit was already backed by a majority of the 12-person board, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Given all that, there was delicious second-layer of truthfulness to Mr. O'Neill's comments in the press release announcing Mr. Pandit's departure. “We respect Vikram’s decision," the chairman said of the move he'd apparently engineered.

Greg Coffey, the co-chief investment officer of Moore Capital Management's European business, is stepping away from the trading floor, according to Bloomberg. Mr. Coffey lost money for clients in the last two years amid tumultuous European markets. He joins Brevan Howard co-founder Chris Rokos and energy trader John Arnold among big players to walk away from hedge funds in the last year.

New Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat's experience running the bad bank which disposed of toxic assets in the wake of the financial crisis, will likely come in handy. According to The Wall Street Journal: Citi Holdings accounts for 24 percent of the bank's assets under new capital rules.

Worst-case scenario projections for the Spanish economy used in a stress test of the nation's banks looks increasingly likely, according to some banking analysts.

A lawyer for Rajat Gupta, the former McKinsey & Co. chief executive officer convicted earlier this year of insider trading, said his client should be sent to Rwanda, not prison. Gary P. Naftalis suggested that Mr. Gupta should be sentenced to probation and allowed to spend the time conducting humanitarian work in the African nation, according to The Times. Prosecutors recommended a sentence of eight to 10 years.

Also from The Times article on Gupta: imagine the indignation when Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney whose office prosecuted Mr. Gupta, arrived to speak to one of his daughter's Harvard Business School classes.

Morgan Stanley beat analysts' estimates, posting profit of 28 cents a share excluding accounting adjustments, according to a press release today.

Bank of America eked out a small profit in the third quarter, the firm said yesterday.

When states attorneys general agreed to a $25 billion settlement with the nation's largest mortgage servicers, the deal included direct payments totaling $2.5 billion to states themselves. The expectation was that state governments would use the funds for mortgage initiatives, according to The Wall Street Journal, but much of the money is being used to plug budget holes.

The FBI arrested a Bangladeshi man and charged him attempting to detonate a 1,000-pound bomb on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

1. We can buy what Mr. Pandit is selling (though no one really is). Nonetheless: "I've been thinking about this for a long time. It was my decision. I made it talking to [Citigroup Chairman Michael] O'Neill, and we did it understanding that the company was ready," Mr. Pandit told Bloomberg's Erik Schatzker. "This was decided yesterday afternoon. I made the decision. I talked to Mr. O'Neill. I don't believe in having lame-duck sessions, in having the outgoing CEO looking over the shoulder of the incoming CEO."

2. That would be an easier pill to swallow if "sources close to the board," etc., weren't running their mouths this way and that, offering an alternate explanation: Citigroup's board told Mr. Pandit he'd have to leave at the end of the year, and he decided to scram now.

Certainly, there are enough recent black marks on Mr. Pandit's resume—from Citi's failed stress test, to its two-grade credit downgrade, the shareholder vote against Mr. Pandit's pay package or its loss to Morgan Stanley in the valuation of Smith Barney.

3. There's also the possibility, of course, that there's more than meets the eye. The Journal reported this morning that investors were chattering that Mr. Pandit's resignation might preface bad news on the legal or regulatory front, with a couple of analysts uttering the Libor-word in the wake of the news. The leaks from sources close to the board appear to have allayed those concerns to some degree (well done, folks).

Mr. Corbat

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 and Europe, would be the firm's new chief executive. Mr. Corbat, who has worked for Citi or its predecessor firms since graduating from Harvard in 1983, previously ran Citi Holdings, the so-called bad bank formed in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis.

Mr. Pandit's resignation comes one day after Citi announced better-than-expected earnings for the third quarter.

"There is nothing better than our third quarter earnings announcement to demonstrate definitively that we have turned this company around," said in a memo to Citi employees published at StreetInsider. "More importantly, I couldn't be more optimistic about the bank's future. Our formula has served the company well for 200 years. By going back to the basics of banking to serve the real economy, putting clients at the center of everything we do, and embracing the principles of Responsible Finance, we have put Citi in a great position for continued success."

Vikram Pandit came to Citi in 2007, when the bank acquired his hedge fund, Old Lane Partners. According to Bloomberg, Mr. Pandit will have received $261 million in compensation since taking the helm at Citi in 2007, including $165 million he received in the sale of Old Lane.

"This is a complete shock," said "Mad Money" Jim Cramer on CNBC today. "I have no idea what's going on here, and this is major and something is very wrong."

"Pandit's young," Mr. Cramer continued in a clip that can be viewed here. "Pandit's young, people respect Pandit. He's created this terrific team that everyone really respects. The guy inherited a total joke company. It had been destroyed, it had been destroyed and he resurrected it. It is shocking."

Well, now we have one possible answer for why Mr. Pandit took so long to respond to Mr. Weill, which is that maybe he was praying on it. He's done it before. Speaking last night at the Appeal of Conscience Foundation benefit at the Waldorf Astoria, the Citi CEO mentioned a trip to a certain holy city a couple of years ago.

“This was still a time of recovery after the financial crisis,” Mr. Pandit said, according to Bloomberg. “Like many visitors I went to the Western Wall. I wrote my prayer on a piece of paper, folded it and placed it between two of the stones. Now, I can’t tell you what it said. But the next day the U.S. government decided to sell its remaining stake in Citi stock.”

Which was nice.

"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.“Pandit was the CEO of Citigroup, which had earlier bollixed its own attempt to buy Wachovia,” “there was bitterness in his eyes,” “Pandit looked nervous, and no wonder,”  “I thought Pandit had been a poor choice,” “he was a hedge fund manager by occupation and one with a mixed record,” “he had no experience as a commercial banker,” “no private investor was likely to invest in Pandit’s bank,” “wouldn’t have known how to underwrite a loan if his life depended on it,” “I was particularly concerned about Citi’s CEO, Vikram Pandit,” “Citi’s management performance during the crisis had not been impressive,” “they had a difficult time making decisions and then executing once the decisions were made,” “couldn’t we at least bring in an experienced commercial banker to run the place?” “I doubted that many senior commercial bankers would be willing to work for Vikram, given his weak reputation,” “he was also boasting that at some point it would start paying dividends again. We had laughed those stories off as delusional.”

First, Nasdaq offered a $40 million compensation pool, with a healthy chunk to paid in credits on future trades.A month later, Nasdaq sweetened the pool to $62 million, with all claims to be paid in cash.

Not good enough for UBS, which said it would “take appropriate legal action against Nasdaq to address its gross mishandling of the offering and its substantial failures to perform its duties,” i.e. the Swiss bank would sue the exchange over every penny of the $356 million it said it lost on the IPO. Not good enough for Citigroup either: "hundreds of millions of dollars of losses suffered by market participants in connection with the Facebook IPO resulted from a series of a series of hasty, self-interested and high-risk business decisions by Nasdaq," it said in a letter of its own.

And so it seemed reasonable to wonder whether Nasdaq would improve its compensation scheme yet again. Not this time, according to Reuters:

Nasdaq OMX Group Inc stood by its proposed $62 million plan to compensate firms affected by the fallout from Facebook's botched initial public offering, taking aim at UBS AG, Citigroup Inc and other parties that derided the payback plan. In a letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission dated September 17, Nasdaq said the proposed compensation pool "goes well beyond what is required under current Nasdaq rules." 

Tadahiro Matsushita, the Japanese official leading a recent crackdown on insider trading, died yesterday in what police concluded was a suicide. Mr. Matsushita's investigation, which Bloomberg reports was not yet complete, led to the resignations of Nomura Holding's chief executive officer.

With the government reducing its stake in AIG, Andrew Ross Sorkin and Neil Barofsky had a telephone conversation about how taxpayers have fared in the bailout.

A German court will rule tomorrow on the legality of the European Central Bank's new bond-buying program.

With the ECB set to start buying sovereign debt, investors' bets on European bonds are looking pretty smart.

Deutsche Bank will cut costs by $5.8 billion in order to meet new regulatory capital requirements, the bank said.

Carl Icahn called the board of directors at Navistar International, the truck and diesel engine maker, a “poster child for abysmal business decisions and poor corporate governance.” Navistar answered that despite Mr. Icahn's “unproductive tactics of threats, attacks and disruption,” the board knows what it's doing.

Court bailiffs in Hong Kong evicted Occupy protestors from HSBC headquarters.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner finished ninth in the 50 to 54 age group at a recent triathlon.

There's a 4 percent chance Ron Paul is the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, according to Morgan Stanley (via Business Insider).

Canadian banks! Hiring amid cutbacks at financial firms elsewhere.