Additional Criticism
Rubin sparked controversy in 2001 when he contacted an acquaintance at the U.S. Treasury Department and asked if the department could convince bond-rating agencies not to downgrade the corporate debt of Enron, a debtor of Citigroup. The Treasury official refused. A subsequent congressional staff investigation cleared Rubin of having done anything illegal.
Journalist Robert Scheer, in his book The Great American Stickup, claims the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act was a key factor in the 2008 financial crisis. Enacted just after the 1930s Great Depression, the Glass–Steagall Act separated commercial and investment banking. The law was repealed by Congress in 1999 during the Clinton presidency, while Rubin was Treasury Secretary. President Obama's current banking system proposals appear to be a return to these former principles although there is no talk of reinstating Glass–Steagall.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Rubin pursued a romantic interest with Iris Mack and did not tell her that he was married.
Read more about this topic: Robert Rubin
Famous quotes containing the words additional and/or criticism:
“Don’t you think I’ve had enough excitement for one evening, without the additional thrill of a strange man making love to me?”
—John L. Balderston (1899–1954)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)