April 22, 2010--Let Them Drink Wine

After bankrupting Citibank and then having taxpayers bail it out, the bank's CEO, Vikram Pandit, took himself out to a posh lunch at one of New York City's swankiest spots, Le Bernardin, where lunch will set you back at least $100. Depending, of course, on the wine you choose.

In his new book, The End of Wall Street, Roger Lowenstein, gets so fine grained in his distressing and infuriating report on the likes of Mr. Pandit, that he even knows about the wine he drank that afternoon.

Vikram Pandit was apparently dining alone, probably enjoying the memories of all the fast ones he and his colleagues had gotten away with and then, when things had gone south, how fortunate he was to be heading a bank that was not only too big to fail but too arrogant not to fire him for incompetence and malfeasance.

He was probably looking to do a little celebrating about his good fortune--that he wouldn't be tossed out on the street where he belonged, albeit with a platinum parachute.

So he perused the wine list to see if he could find anything by the glass that appealed to him. Seeing nothing worthy of his connoisseurship and self-worth, he decided to order a whole bottle; but since he is a moderate man, he drank just one glass, leaving the rest to be poured down the drain.

To quote Lowenstein, he was looking for "a glass of wine worth drinking." Happily, he found something--a few sips from a $350 bottle seemed to suit that bill.

Speaking of the bill, to pay for lunch I assume he used his Citibank credit card.

As they say, "For everything else there's MasterCard." Or, in his case, "For everything else there's Uncle Sam."