Respectfully, sir, this is plain wrong. In fact it was the mistaken notion that ‘market risk’ and ‘credit risk’ are wholly divisible that mightily contributed to this disaster.

As we just witnessed on a colossal scale, credit risk and market risk get more and more tightly bound as things go wrong.

2) Blissex: Your comments suggest you view yourself as Ivy League material, but they also suggest you would be eliminated by any company adhering to the No A**hole rule. Presume for a moment, painful as it may be, that both are true — what does that alone say about the ‘guaranteed value’ of a being a real winner with a Yale/Harvard education?

3) Yves: Your point about the end beginning with Sandy Weil’s assumption of leadership is dead on. And it should be remembered that it was — no surprise — Bob Rubin who sat atop Citi and arbitrated the removal of John Reed in favor of his buddy Weil.

As to the long-term value of Weil’s ‘roll-up and ignore operations’ scheme, funnily enough his daughter Jessica Bibliowicz is now scraping her knees with that same strategy. But all sorts of buildings now have Sandy’s name etched onto them, so for the family it was a big win.

4) The fact that the NY Times would dare pound a little on Bob Rubin is a remarkable turnabout — they lionized him regularly until today, including featuring him on their Sunday magazine during the Clinton era. As we usually say in happier times with respect to a job promotion: overdue and well-deserved! Now, NY Times, how about Walter Durant?…

“Nonetheless, Citi is about to be bailed out while GM is allowed to languish. That’s because Wall Street’s self-serving view of the unique role of financial institutions is mirrored in the two agencies that run the American economy — the Treasury and the Fed. Their job, as they see it, is to keep the financial economy “sound,” by which they mean keeping Wall Street’s own investors and creditors happy.

Because the public doesn’t understand the intricacies of finance, it’s easily persuaded that this is the same thing as keeping credit flowing to Main Street. That’s why the public and its representatives have committed $700 billion of taxpayer money to Wall Street and another $500 to $600 billion of subsidized loans to the Street from the Fed — bailing out the investors and creditors of every major bank, including , momentarily, Citi — only to discover, at the end of this frantic and unbelievably expensive exercise, that American jobs and communities are more endangered than they were at the start.”

The guys at Enron went to jail for similar and lesser crimes.

When the world financial system was shuddering in 1997 — in a climate of global fear similar to today, though less intense — Messrs. Geithner and Summers spoke over Thanksgiving weekend that year to hash out a way to craft a rescue package for South Korea. Their boss, Mr. Rubin, was wary of intervening, afraid the country’s financial problems were so big that an intervention might not make sense. Messrs. Geithner and Summers disagreed, seeing intervention as a key to stabilizing the country. That night, they crafted a proposal they thought would pass muster with Mr. Rubin, who ultimately agreed to the plan.

Just remember: it’s always someone elses fault, and you will do fine in corporate america.

Spoken like a true sophisticate. By any chance, did you have a past life as a courtier at Versailles circa 1788?