It’s Thanksgiving week and that means it’s time to roast the biggest turkeys in business from the year just past — and 2009 certainly had its share of bird-brained characters.
* Tim Geithner: The cabinet member who shouldn’t have been confirmed in the first place is finishing the year with a whimper. His performance Thursday at a congressional hearing was so bad the White House had to issue a statement of support. It’s a fair bet President Obama’s least-popular appointed official won’t be around to roast next Thanksgiving.
* Lloyd Blankfein: Never have so many millions been spent on public relations with so little effect. Goldman’s image was badly tarnished in 2009, although this past week’s mea culpa seems to have helped a bit.
* John Thain: After being forced out of Bank of America earlier this year and humiliated by reports that he spent millions to decorate his Merrill Lynch office, the man who is derisively called “I-Robot,” is putting out the word that he’s ready to run a public company again. Trouble is, Thain is the only one who seems to have missed his time in the executive suite.
* Larry Summers: While President Obama’s chief economic adviser has done a good job of keeping out of the crossfire, his legacy as president of Harvard continues to haunt him. Iris Mack, a former derivatives trader at Harvard, said she warned Summers back in 2002 that the endowment, now devastated, was invested in too many risky assets and was fired as a result. Summers denies the charge.
* Jeffrey Immelt: The head of General Electric somehow managed to get through the financial crisis without most of the world knowing that his company was skating on super-thin ice — propped up only by billions in FDIC guarantees. The sale of NBC to Comcast will only underscore the fact that mother GE added very little value to NBC over the two decades that it owned it.
* Vikram Pandit: The Citigroup CEO managed to hold on to his job in 2009, but his image suffered a big blow at the hands of Andrew Ross Sorkin, who paints an unflattering portrait of Pandit in his best-selling book, “Too Big to Fail.” If Pandit can’t play the “source game” to his advantage, it’s hard to see how he’s up to the much tougher task of reviving Citi’s fortunes.
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