A famous American, his name sullied by accusations of stupid and reckless behaviour, emerged from a long absence this week. Nothing he says now can ever restore his reputation to its pre-scandal lustre, nor bring back the millions of dollars in future earnings he has lost. But it is never too late to try to make amends, to look into the camera and bare your soul, or at least your regrets, to the world.
So he did. "Let me start by saying how sorry I am," said a humbled Charles (Chuck) Prince, the former CEO of Citigroup. (You didn't think we were talking about golf , did you?) Yes, the Great Recession may be over, but the Great Collective Apology-fest is just gaining momentum. One by one, key figures in the meltdown are stepping up for mandatory acts of bowing and scraping, though precisely what they are apologizing for varies by person. Goldman Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein decided to keep it vague. "We participated in things that were clearly wrong and we have reasons to regret and apologize for." (What things, exactly? Um …) In the case of Mr. Prince, who resigned in 2007 amid staggering losses, he is sorry that he was "not more prescient" and didn't see the disaster coming, a failing that allowed Citi to accumulate bad investments the way Tiger Woods collected mistresses.
The venue for his confession was something called the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which was set up last year to, well, uncover the roots the financial crisis.
Americans are awfully good at this sort of thing. By the time the commission reports back to President Obama in December, you can be certain it will have an exhaustive account of what happened. But by then it will have been 27 months since Lehman Brothers collapsed and about four years since it became clear that major U.S. banks had gotten themselves into a heap of trouble with easy mortgages.
The world has moved on. On Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average hit 11,000 for the first time since that black September. Credit markets long ago returned to something resembling normalcy. China is helping to drive what looks like a solid global recovery. A crisis investigation may be a worthwhile exercise, but at some point the U.S. political machine is going to have to look forward, not backward.
In other words: It no longer matters who's to blame, but what plans the United States - and other governments, including our own - put in place for the next crisis. And there will be a next time, unless the human instinct for repeating past mistakes has somehow been repealed. There will always be banks that do dumb things, usually because they've given their employees strong incentives to do them, and run into trouble and collapse. The goals should be to prevent it from happening frequently, to mitigate the damage to the economy when it does happen, and to make the investors pay the cost .
The 2008 crisis response was a bust on that last count. It's not just bankers who were bailed out; it was hedge fund managers, pension funds and other investors who'd given them the money they blew. The moral hazard created by such bailouts is massive now, and little has been done to address that problem. Former Citi chairman Robert Rubin was right when he told the crisis inquiry this week: "We simply cannot have institutions that are 'too big to fail' or 'too interconnected to fail.'" If that's the case, though, Citigroup should have been dismembered more than a year ago, when it was kept alive only by a feeding tube that gave it more than $40-billion (U.S.) in government cash. The shareholders should have been wiped out, and creditors would have taken losses, too (as Lehman's did).
Instead, Citi's reward for having managed itself so poorly was survival and what is now a $130-billion (U.S.) market cap, twice the size of Toronto-Dominion Bank. Citi's creditors got off easy and the shareholders retain the hope of some day getting their money back. (Except the ones who bought at the bottom, who've already earned a princely return.) Why did it play out this way? Because the Lehman bankruptcy set off a series of events so traumatic that it taught politicians that no big financial institution should be allowed to fail. As usual, they took the wrong lesson. The right one is different: No major bank should be allowed to fail in a disorderly way. Lehman caused chaos because there was no plan for how to deal with it - how to sort out the liabilities and assets and quickly move on (as happens with smaller banks that become insolvent).
The blame game is fun, and maybe there's something cathartic about watching fallen titans like Chuck Prince say they're sorry. But in the crisis post-mortem, it's far more important that the people who govern the world's largest economy restore something that's fundamental to healthy capitalism: the ability to fail.