Weill and Greenberg.

Well, maybe.

I know enough about Citi to say with confidence
that the conventional wisdom - that Weill left behind a structure that needed work- is true . By chance I sat next to him once at a charity event but all in that case all I learned was to keep my feet out of the aisle so they wouldn't be stepped on by his near mob of well wishers.

In Greenberg's case I only know the extraneous but creditable information that he donated $25 million to Geoffrey Canada's Harlem's Children's Zone.

An argument for your position is that it might well have been true that whatever their legacies they had the sort of skills that would have permitted them to move faster ,more skillfully and most importantly,earlier, in the crisis . At least, compared to their successors. But of course that was in the future when Spitzer acted against them.

shooter asks;

Isn't Rubin the genius that balanced the federal budget during Clinton?

Yes.

REaganomics is the cause of this problem, even it is misapplied Reaganomics.

When Obama was sticking his thumb in Bill Clinton's eye by citing a slew of President's as transformational including Reagan in that list, and hurting Bill's ego a touch thus masterfully getting Bill to lash out unwisely, he was on to the main point.

Ronald Reagan shifted the conversation so far to the right's advantage that to even barely get elected, Clinton coopted many of the Reagan precepts as his own. Free Trade, Welfare Reform (I concede it needed reform, I just argue that the approach taken was wrongheaded and Reaganesque) and DERUGULATION. All of that stuff works short term, it is all the core of Reaganomics and the downfall of any semblence of a stable economy. The only real difference Clinton showed from the Reagan position on the economy was tax policy.

Other than tax policy Clinton looked very much like a moderate Republican when you look at his accomplishments. The wealthy want a somewhat destabilized economy, they can survive the busts and sore to unimaginable heights in the booms. Most people suffer. Sure they prosper in the good times, but they suffer terribly in the busts. That is why the middle class is shrinking so rapidly, we are losing our main assets, our homes.

Bush is so slow to react to that crisis because he does not really understand what the real value of one measley home is to most people. For a majority of americans the home they live often times provides for their retirement.

I digress, my main point is that Obama needs to be that transformational figure he aspires to be by returning policy to the service of the people with the the goal of supporting and growing the middle class. He will need individuals of Rubin's caliber to execute many of the programs to do that, Obama just needs to take strong enough control of the policy aims that Rubin's tendency toward deregulation does not enter into the picture innapropriately. Besides Obama has NOT appointed Rubin to any formal post, and just because Geitner and Sullivan are Rubin acolytes does not mean they will only support rubinesque eceonomic ideology. Remember only Nixon could go to China...

eds

What if anything have they really learned? Greenspan made a faint 'mea culpa', how about others?

Here's one;

NEW YORK (Associated Press) - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke acknowledges he was wrong in believing that there would be limited fallout to financial markets from risky mortgages that soured after the housing market's collapse.

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/apwire/766ac8fcd8702b405e545d7dc9eb4718.htm

The problem with trying to get the Rubin or Paulson types to admit they were wrong won't work because they made tens (hundresds?) of millions doing what they did, so how could anything like that be wrong to them?