Sanford I. Weill's call to break up big banks certainly took many on Wall Street by surprise. But it was such a major turnabout that at least one longtime banking grandee thinks it's unbelievable.
Alan C. Greenberg, the former chief of Bear Stearns, told Bloomberg Television in an interview on Tuesday that the Mr. Weill he knew would never make that kind of remark. Instead, he intoned, the onetime banking titan may have actually been impersonated by a certain guerrilla comedian.
From the interview:
“It wasn't Sandy Weill. It was that guy Sacha Barry Cohen, or whatever his name is. … Yeah, he was impersonating Sandy.â€
“That was not Sandy. I know Sandy. I think it was a guy making a movie about Wall Street or something, that's my guess.â€
Mr. Greenberg - Ace, to his friends - went on to add that while it's possible that the man who created Citigroup had undergone a Damascene conversion, it's something of a moot point. “That egg has been scrambled, so we can quit talking about it,†he said.
