Blame Robert Rubin

摘要

He is becoming the Republicans' voodoo doll, with party members happily sticking pins in his effigy to harm Democrats and ward off evil spirits. This may seem a bit odd, considering that Robert Rubin, as treasury secretary, teamed up with congressional Republicans to impress fiscal discipline on a reluctant Bill Clinton. But there it is: the carefree 1990s have recently become the "Greenspan-Rubin bubble" in some conservative circles. And the Republican National Committee accuses Mr Rubin of personal arid culpable involvement in the Enron debacle. His detractors point out that, after leaving the Treasury in 1999, Mr Rubin became a director of Citigroup, the energy trader's biggest creditor. Citigroup, they say, invented dubious offshore schemes that enabled Enron to hide its debts, distort its creditworthiness and inflate its share price. Then, with Enron on the verge of bankruptcy, Mr Rubin called his former department and asked whether it might lean on credit-rating agencies to persuade them not to downgrade Enron yet. In other words, having ignored the seething cauldron while he was a public servant, Mr Rubin attempted, once back in private business, to trade on his connections when the whole thing boiled over.