Vikram Pandit, it turns out, has something of an online fan club. When I described
him yesterday as "a dull technocrat who has never achieved very much,"
I was immediately slapped down by commenters – most of whom spent much
more energy attacking me than defending Pandit.
The best thing that anybody ever says about Pandit is that he’s a "respected
investment banker" – which basically means that he’s a generally
amiable chap. Pranay Gupte has a good profile
of him which reveals him also to be ambitious – something he shares with,
well, everybody else on Wall Street. And certainly he seems to be very good
at rising up corporate ladders.
But it really is hard to point to much in the way of solid achievements on
Pandit’s resume – besides, of course, his coup in managing to sell his
fair-to-middling hedge fund to Citigroup for $800 million.
I’m not sure that anybody really has the ability to run the sprawling
mess known as Citigroup, so in that sense maybe Pandit is no worse a CEO than
whoever constituted Plan B. But the only person showing any real enthusiasm
for him seems to be Bob Rubin, who now gets to retreat back into his ivory tower,
making vast amounts of money without taking on any real responsibility.
Looking at the team of Pandit and Bischoff, I see two career investment bankers
neither of whom has a fraction of the vision (Sandy Weill’s vision, to be precise)
which created Citigroup in the first place. It’s entirely possible that Citi
was held together by sheer force of Sandy’s forward momentum, if you’ll exclude
the mixed metaphor, and that when Citi stopped growing, it was inevitable that
it would fall apart. Perhaps what the bank needs now is an experienced M&A
dealmaker who can cut up the giant and sell it off at a profit – but as
far as I know Pandit has no M&A experience. Maybe that’s Bischoff’s job.