The Five Families are collecting their annual tribute:
The master of ceremonies made a mistake as he named John Thain one of the year’s finest dads, introducing him as the chief executive officer of Citigroup (C) Inc.“Vikram Pandit will be very unhappy,” Thain said, accepting an award from Father’s Day/Mother’s Day Council Inc. on June 14. “I’m actually the CEO of CIT, which is similar, but not quite the same.”
The confusion was warranted. In the past two months, half a dozen current and former bank chiefs have been honored in New York along with Thain, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch & Co. who arranged its 2008 sale to Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and left after Merrill’s $15 billion loss forced the combined firm to seek more government support.
Bank of America’s Brian T. Moynihan, JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s Jamie Dimon, Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman and Pandit are among the bankers recognized since May 1, a day of international protests against Wall Street. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. President Gary D. Cohn accepted an award for the firm that evening from Friends of the High Line over hen-of-the-woods mushrooms and slow-braised short ribs. Goldman Sachs and its employees have given more than $6 million to the Manhattan park, he said.
“Look, the whole idea of these things is to raise money for the charity,” Thain said in an interview after accepting his Father of the Year award. “The demonization of Wall Street and bankers is very much a function of the press and of Washington, and not much more broadly held.”
Reckon it's going to take an even more catastrophic WallStreetFAIL event---something like, oh, this, maybe---before our leaders realize that our private-sector economy is operating under two distinct handicaps: (1) The companies that provide the funding for it are nothing more than criminal conspiracies, and (2) they are all run by arrogant assholes whose contempt for the public that bailed them out is only rivaled by their incompetency at their jobs. Otherwise, back up the armored car---we're handing out more free money again!
---Vitelius
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