A visionary.  There are very few people in the world who can really achieve this designation…and I really don’t care if you’re talking in music, dance, finance or religion…a visionary is a very rare thing.

When he was Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton he had a vision of American prosperity built on shipping our manufacturing capacity overseas,  the repeal of Glass-Steagall so that banks could grow too big to fail, and the absolute prohibition of  anyone anywhere messing with the brave new world of financial derivatives…and he achieved all of these things as Secretary of the Treasury.

Then he joined his first too big too fail creation, Citigroup, as their senior counselor where he kept that same big picture in mind—as befitting a visionary–as he spread his Robert Rubin seeds ever deeper into the fertile lands of Wall Street.

And how did that work out for America and for Citigroup?

Well for America we had the blowup, the bailout, the destruction of the middle class and a national debt in excess of $15 TRILLION dollars. And for the owners of Citigroup?  The shareholders?  They saw the value of their stock drop from $800 dollars a share to less than $40 a share.

But on the plus side—he did make himself $100 million and a handful of people including me very very very rich…in a very very very concrete way.

We got the real gains and America and the Citigroup shareholders?  They got the visionary gains…Because the dictionary definition of visionary? Is existing only in the imagination…

And so all those people who didn’t get the real gains?  I hear Peter Pan is still cashing visionary checks in Never Never Land.