Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit said leverage brought on the crisis of 2008, while living with the consequences of a period of over-leveraging characterizes the market today, which he says is a fundamental difference between the two.
Speaking at the SIFMA Annual Meeting on Monday, Pandit also said "market confidence moves a lot faster than policy makers. Confidence is a big part of what it takes to deal with crises, and we're got to figure that out even better. We're living through [that] today again in Europe … We have to make sure that these things are more synchronized. That's a real danger. It's a real issue for policy makers to deal with on an ongoing basis."
According to Bloomberg Television, when asked about the lessons Citigroup has learned from the financial crisis, he said the lessons are simple:
"We understand very well that banking had to go back to its root mission, which is to serve our clients. Banking has to be a means to an end, not an end in itself. For us, the strategic restructuring was straightforward. We went back to the basics of banking."
