Resolutions for Obama, Wall Street
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Well, haven't we just had a wonderful 2010? From the standpoint of Wall Street it has been terrific. Public memories have faded, pretty much on cue, and the same people who brought you the Great Unraveling of 2008 are still with us, most of them still in power.
Rather than dwell on all the bad things that happened over the past year, as I did in this space last week, I want to be forward-looking this time. What I've prepared is a list of New Year's resolutions for every person on my Christmas list.
So, working my way from the mighty to the moronic:
President Obama: It's not too late to start afresh. Isn't that what New Year's resolutions are all about? You still have plenty of time left in your administration to fix the mistakes you made at the start. That's right: purge your entire economic/financial regulatory team. Send Timothy Geithner to some consular post in South Asia. He still hasn't managed to inspire public confidence in the economy, and you had no reasonable expectation that he would. It's great that you're sending Larry Summers back to Harvard. Whatever advice he's giving you is obviously not working. But to give the public a real gift, you have to fire Mary Schapiro, the ineffectual head of the ineffectual SEC. I don't know if the market will rally from such a long-overdue housecleaning, but the public will thank you for it. (P.S., I hope you and Michelle enjoyed the fruitcake.)
Lloyd Blankfein: Working my way down the list, the next stop is the second most powerful man in America, the CEO of Goldman Sachs (GS). I wonder sometimes if Goldman's proven ability to shrug off regulatory consequences and horrid publicity is really relative -- not absolute -- based upon the weakness of the people regulating it. How would Blankfein have fared against a William O. Douglas or Joe Kennedy? Or an Eliot Spitzer or Rudy Giuliani for that matter? If competent people ran our regulatory and law enforcement agencies, would Goldman have emerged from its CDO hijinks with nothing more than a lame SEC civil action? All we know is that Blankfein has done a bang-up job fending off Congress and delivering spin on Charlie Rose. The New Year's Resolution I offer for Lloyd Blankfein is that he keep up the great work.
Preet Bharara: There is great inherent power in inaction. If you watch your neighbor's house burn down, aren't you exercising power by not calling the fire department? Bharara has achieved just that kind of power as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Just think of all the prosecutions he hasn't conducted! All the investigations he hasn't ordered! All the terror he hasn't sown on Wall Street! Instead he has put on his own version of The Eighties Show, by turning some sporadic prosecutions of insider traders into a major prosecutorial juggernaut. Even in that sideshow he has accomplished little. His prosecution of Bernie Madoff's co-conspirators has been predictably slow, lumbering and unsurprising. My New Year's Resolution for Bharara is that get a well-paying job working for one of the big Wall Street banks. They get a competent lawyer and the public gets a prosecutor who couldn't possibly be worse. That's what I call a win-win situation.
Mark Hurd: As the disgraced former CEO of HP (HPQ), Hurd has special responsibilities for all disgraced ex-CEOs (and disgraced current CEOs too, I guess). In an era in which there are far too few disgraced ex-CEOs, thanks to the non-work of Preet Bharara and Mary Schapiro, his responsibility for upstanding behavior is particularly acute. So it was dismaying to read how he is fighting release of the letter that got him fired. It seems so whiny, so petty, so... oh, so Hewlett-Packardish of him! My New Year's Resolution for Hurd is to study the Barbra Streisand Effect, enjoy his $40 million golden parachute, and write on the blackboard 100 times, "I am too well paid to not be a happy disgraced ex-CEO."
Vikram Pandit: What we have here is an inspiring immigrant success story. Only in America could a young boy from India climb from mediocre hedge fund manager to one of the truly Teflon CEOs of our age. Why just look at the recent publicity that the effervescent CEO of Citigroup (C) has received in recent weeks. He cut a ribbon at a branch, just like any ordinary CEO who hasn't gotten $45 billion from taxpayers to keep his company afloat. He's getting positive press from the major media. My New Year's resolution for Pandit: Write a book entitled, "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but With a Big Bailout."
Patrick Byrne: My favorite CEO, who as overlord of Overstock.com (OSTK) has benefited from the Mary Schapiro reign of non-terror, surfaced the other day in the comments section of a Financial Times blog post that described how Netflixt (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings has shown the right way to fight shorts. No, that's not an imposter. That's Byrne in the comments section, eloquently proving the point of the blog item. How many CEOs do you know who comb blogs for items on them, and then write impassioned responses when they are casually mentioned? My New Year's Resolution for Byrne: Hire somebody to run the company.
