ITEMS FOR A FUTURE "WHERE ARE THEY NOW?" POST

Maybe at the end this year, I'll Google the names of these Masters of the Universe who helped bring us the credit crunch to find out how they ended up.

Citigroup '07 Fees Led Banks Heading for Worst Year Since '01
By Lisa Kassenaar
March 3 (Bloomberg)
Since the beginning of 2007, banks around the world have written down a total of $181 billion in assets with exposure to subprime mortgages and leveraged loans.

``A year ago, everyone thought trees were going to grow to the moon,'' Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co., said in an interview on Jan. 27 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. ``Obviously, 2007 was a much tougher year than expected, and 2008 is probably going to be the same.''

Out-of-Control Risk

On today's chastened Wall Street, the watchword is risk management. Four of Dimon's colleagues at top investment banks lost their jobs because they let risk get out of hand. UBS CEO Peter Wuffli was the first to go, in July. Then Merrill Lynch & Co.'s Stan O'Neal retired and was replaced by New York Stock Exchange CEO John Thain. Shortly after joining Merrill in December, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. president put himself in charge of risk management.

In November, Citigroup CEO Charles Prince was replaced by Vikram Pandit, a former Morgan Stanley president. Pandit says he's considering selling off pieces of the bank, which has $2.18 trillion in assets.

At Bear Stearns Cos., CEO James ``Jimmy'' Cayne ousted Co- President Warren Spector and then, in January, was forced out himself, giving up his CEO job while remaining chairman. Bear Stearns, which ranked No. 19 in the Bloomberg 20 in 2006, fell off the 2007 list after a series of setbacks that in the third quarter saw the company post its steepest profit decline in more than a decade.