Business

School daze revisited

What difference does a decade of bubble-bursting financial distress make? Well, apparently not so much if you flouted the rules, raked in the bucks and then lay low during the inevitable storm.

What else to make of the televised spectacle Friday morning on CNBC when disgraced former telecom analyst Jack Grubman giggled in glee about a front-page exclusive in The Post that his legal nemesis, former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, was living apart from his wife, Silda?

Grubman went on to say that nothing has changed on Wall Street in the decade since he was banned from working there. On that score, he was refreshingly correct.

You remember Grubman, the highly paid Citigroup analyst who put his imprimatur on AT&T stock to get slots for his twins at the fastmoney nursery school of choice, the pedestrian-sounding but über-elite 92nd Street Y.

This was accomplished, according to an e-mail written by Grubman himself, by getting his boss, Sandy Weill, to pony up a $1 million donation to the place in return for an upgrade of Ma Bell’s shares. It was private-school arbitrage at its finest.

Or at least it was by 2002 standards. In 2013, Grubman would look like a piker.

These days, the transactions are more discreet but far more substantial: a building donation here, a pre-admissions pledge to a school there — anything to fatten the coffers of schools that somehow can’t seem to make ends meet on $42,000-per-student tuition.

Indeed, nowadays some of the city’s top private schools are covertly referred to as the “Goldman Sachs schools” or the “hedge-fund schools” because of all the Wall Street money that calls the shots at those institutions.

Little wonder Grubman has moved his wife and twins to Pennsylvania, where a hundred million still talks.

Jack Grubman wasn’t the worst of the financial finaglers who messed things up for the rest of us over the past 15 years, but he was one of the first and at the time one of the most audacious. America is the land of second chances, so give him his. There’s just no need to step back into the public eye and remind us of it.

terrykkeenan@gmail.com