Sallie Krawcheck is the latest woman in a top-tier Wall Street job to get the boot in connection with the billion-dollar losses roiling financial markets.
Krawcheck, who had headed Citigroup’s wealth management division, is leaving the firm with no job lined up, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. A former chief operating officer whose meteoric rise had been the subject of two Fortune magazine covers - “The Last Honest Analyst” and “Can Sallie Save Citi?” - Krawcheck, 43, was once talked about as a contender for Citigroup’s top spot.
Her ouster was part of a management overhaul by Citi’s new CEO Vikram S. Pandit, spurred by the mortgage debacle and his desire to install his own team. He reportedly offered her a senior level advisory position, which she declined. Her remuneration in 2007 was roughly $11 million.
With Krawcheck out, there are few women left within the top ranks of any of the major financial firms.
Zoe Cruz was fired as co-president of Morgan Stanley last year, after the department she oversaw made a series of disastrous subprime trades.
In June, Lehman demoted CFO Erin Callan, after investors raised questions about the bank’s financial statements. She moved to Credit Suisse Group before Lehman filed for bankruptcy.
As for Krawcheck, she had been recruited by former-Citigroup CEO Sanford Weill to run the company’s stock-research division in October, 2002, which had been tainted by scandals involving biased research.
She became chief financial officer in November, 2004, under Weill’s successor, Charles O. Prince III, a job she held until early 2007. But as the bank’s losses piled up quarter after quarter, Krawcheck came in for increasing blame, and Prince eventually sidelined her, pushing her over to head the wealth management unit.
“Of the trio of Wall Street’s most powerful women, in fact, she was the last one standing,” wrote Fortune editor-at-large Patricia Sellers.
Krawcheck was born in New Orleans and studied at the University of North Carolina before becoming a banker at Salomon Brothers in New York. She did a stint in Salomon’s London office before joining Sanford Bernstein in 1994.
Prince, her onetime mentor, was ousted late last year, after mortgage-bond writedowns saddled the New York-based bank with a record fourth-quarter loss of almost $10 billion.
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