"How much?"

“Our job is to set a tone at the top to incent (sic) people to do the right thing, and to set up safety nets to catch people who make mistakes or do the wrong thing, and correct those as quickly as possible. And it is working. It is working”.

The above is a quote made by Chuck Prince, then CEO of Citigroup from the New York Times back in 2006. Recently The New York Post ran a headline exclaiming: 'Bounce These Bozo Bankers', how things change. Bearing the brunt of the anger now swirling around like some poisonous whirlpool is Robert Rubin, a man who has worked at a senior level at Citi for almost a decade, taking some $107m in compensation in the process. It was Rubin, some claim, who pushed the firm's traders into taking more risk and who is largely responsible for Citi's current parlous position (asset write downs now around $65bn). Former CEO Chuck Prince (now you really have to agree with me, that is one serious name!) is also being blamed, with The New York Times quoting one insider who said: 'He didn't know a CDO from a grocery list', and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Citi's largest individual stockholder, confirming that he was 'sorry for appointing' him.

Well that’s ok then. I will sleep more soundly knowing that the Prince is ‘sorry’.

However, word reaches me that Rubin, who has taken some $115 million in compensation from Citigroup since 1999, is telling anyone who will listen and, let’s be honest, those numbers are reducing daily that he could have gone elsewhere for more moolah. Is it me, or am I the only one who is beginning to wonder of things haven’t got just a tad out of hand? Here we have a guy who has been a major part of the biggest banking debacle in history not showing an ounce of remorse, in fact, quite the opposite. Rubin acknowledged that he was involved in a board decision to ramp up risk post 2003, but insisted that this misfired as executives executed the plan properly. This logic lost me completely I’m afraid. How bad could things be? Maybe if the executives had not executed the plan properly things might be better, who knows, certainly not Rubin! He also appears to justify his compensation by suggesting that he could have got more elsewhere: His actual words were, “I bet there's not a single year where I couldn't have gone somewhere else and made more”. Some Citi investors may be wishing he had gone for all the good he appears to have done.

On a lighter note, I heard an interesting story recently regarding the Somali pirates. Fresh from extracting over £100m from the Saudis for that massive oil tanker, the pirates are said to have considered hijacking Citigroup. They all got together and plans were being drafted, when one of the cleverer gang members pointed out a fundamental flaw in their thinking – like who would pay for the company's release? The US Government? Hardly. More likely they would be happy to see the back of it! 'OK', one gang member countered, 'Why don't we at least open an account and stick our booty there?' 'Are you crazy?' responded the gang leader. 'That's far too risky. I'd rather keep the cash under my mattress. It'll be safer there'. In the end, the group decided to use the tanker money to buy Citi (not that difficult considering where the share price has been), apply for further funds from the TARP (the US Troubled Asset Relief Program), and then push off back to Somalia with it. That's apparently far more profitable than hijacking for a living, as any banker will tell you.

Talking of hijacking, the UK Government continues on its merry way with the idea that there is no reason at all why the young should not have their futures hijacked. Now when I was dealing in finance (at a very low level you understand, knocking out small loans from a secondary finance house), the customers used to call these loans ‘the glad and sorry’, in other words, glad they had the product, sorry they had to pay back the loan they took to buy said product. Now, along with everything else in the looking glass world of politics, we have the UK Government’s own peculiar inverted version of ‘the glad and sorry’. Their version is “sorry we got you into such a mess everyone, glad we won’t be around when the bill really hits.”

Go figure.