This is precious:
Then there is Richard “Is This America?” Kovacevich, the chairman of Wells Fargo. Late last week, Kovacevich gave a talk at Stanford University, complaining about how unfair it is that the government forced his bank to take $25 billion in bailout money last year when it could have easily raised private capital — and then compounded that outrage by changing the terms of the deal and forcing Wells to cut its dividend. Kovacevich said it was “asinine” for the Treasury to order his and other big banks to undergo a special “stress test,” explaining that well-run banks like Wells were routinely doing their own stress tests.
This isn’t to say that Wells Fargo isn’t well-run. For all I know, it is. But how on earth could any bank be making the “trust us, we know what we’re doing” argument at this point?
The arrogance of the banking world seems to know no bounds. A friend of mine in finance, someone I genuinely like, even if he was predicting Lehman would bounce back this summer, told me “Vikram Pandit should just tell the government `leave me alone for two years and let me do my job'”.
It’s amazing.