Resolutions for Obama, Wall Street

Gary Weiss offers some New Year's resolutions for President Obama, CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Citi and others.
By Gary Weiss ,

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 sendingLarry Summers back to Harvard. Whatever advice he's giving you isobviously not working. But to give the public a real gift, you have tofire 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) - Get Report

. 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) - Get Report

, 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) - Get Report

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) - Get Report

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) - Get Report

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.

Gary Weiss has covered Wall Street wrongdoing for almost a quarter century. His coverage of stock fraud at BusinessWeek won many awards, and included a cover story, "The Mob on Wall Street," which exposed mob infiltration of brokerages. He uncovered the Salomon Brothers bond-trading scandal, and wrote extensively on the dangers posed by hedge funds, Internet fraud and out-of-control leverage. He was a contributing editor at Conde Nast Porfolio, writing about the people most intimately involved in the financial crisis, from Timothy Geithner to Bernard Madoff. His book "Born to Steal" (Warner Books: 2003), described the Mafia's takeover of brokerage houses in the 1990s. "Wall Street Versus America" (Portfolio: 2006) was an account of investor rip-offs. He blogs at garyweiss.blogspot.com.

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