News that Sir Win Bischoff, formerly chairman of Citigroup, is taking over as chairman of Lloyds Banking Group does not exactly inspire confidence. After all, Citigroup needed a massive bailout from the US government in November 2008, receiving $45bn under the TARP scheme and receiving government guarantees on another $306bn of assets. Those figures exceed even those of AIG – the posterboy for mismanagement and incompetence on Wall Street. So clearly Sir Win is just the man to run Britain's biggest and (arguably) most troubled bank...
I'd prefer we adopted the approach advocated by Tim Ambler and Keith Boyfield in our recent publication, Regulatory Myopia: "If any financial company is rescued by the government, the directors should be treated as for bankruptcy: i.e. they should be disqualified with pro rata loss of bonuses and pension rights". The City's current failure-free merry-go-round just gives capitalism a bad name.
