This is what it feels like to be mauled by a Bair — as in Sheila Bair.
The former chief of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. shreds Wall Street’s top chieftains in her forthcoming book, portraying Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit as inexperienced and ex-Bank of America boss Ken Lewis as a “country bumpkin.”
As a top bank regulator, Bair was one of the key behind-the-scenes players during the financial crisis who also questioned whether the big banks needed a bailout.
Her hard-charging style — which rubbed many in Washington and on Wall Street the wrong way — is on full display in the 423-page tell-all, titled “Bull By the Horns.
The book published by Free Press, a division of Simon and Schuster, is slated for release Tuesday, but excerpts appeared yesterday on Fortune.com.
Bair makes it clear that she thought Pandit wasn’t up to the job of running Citi, a sprawling financial colossus, during the darkest days of the financial crisis.
“I thought Pandit had been a poor choice,” she writes. “He was a hedge-fund manager by occupation and one with a mixed record at that.”
Bair famously drew Pandit’s ire after the FDIC blessed Wells Fargo’s acquisition of Wachovia Corp., even as Citi was in the process of purchasing the deposit-taking institution.
“Wachovia was failing and certainly needed a merger partner to stabilize it, but Citi had its own problems — as I was becoming increasingly aware,” she wrote.
Bair also faults Lewis, who stepped down as head of BofA in 2009, for his appetite for mergers.
“He was a decent traditional banker, but as a dealmaker his skills were clearly wanting,” Bair writes. “He was viewed somewhat as a country bumpkin by the CEOs of the big New York banks, and not completely without justification.”