• When the banking system collapsed, due in part to bank-friendly policies that Mr. Rubin advocated, he made more than $100 million while others lost everything.  

• In part because of its complexity, less attention has been paid to Rubin’s role in the unleashing of the over-the-counter derivatives market.  In March 1998, Brooksley Born, chairman of the CFTC, wanted to release a "concept paper" that would raise a series of questions about the possible regulation of derivatives. "I was very concerned about the dark nature of these markets," Mr. Born told the Washington Post in 2009.  "I didn’t think we knew enough about them."  Mr. Rubin, Mr. Summers, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt countered that Ms. Born was out of her depth.

• Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Levitt, and others have conceded errors in judgment that, upon reflection, may have created conditions that led to the crisis.  President Clinton, too, wishes he had a few mulligans.  Mr. Rubin hasn’t looked back, at least not publicly.  Those close to him say that he dealt with the facts of the financial markets as they presented themselves.

• Between the departure of Citibank’s CEO Charles Prince and the appointment of Win Bischoff, Mr. Rubin served 5 weeks as chairman of the board. He accompanied investment banker Michael Klein to Abu Dhabi to raise a $7.5 billion investment in Citigroup from the Abu Dhabi Development Authority, but wasn’t involved in the fund’s due diligence for the investment or in the negotiation of the deal.  In testifying to the FCIC about those five weeks, he made it sound as if he was as ceremonial as the groom atop a wedding cake.  Mr. Rubin did not attend meetings at Bear Stearns during the firm’s collapse in March 2008, nor was he at any of the infamous September New York Federal Reserve sessions when Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and AIG each went down the tubes, or nearly did.

• It’s a mystery why Mr. Rubin vanished at such a crucial moment in the nation’s financial history, but there were distractions. In October 2007, as Citigroup was imploding, Mr.Rubin went to South Beach to visit his father, who died a year later at 101. In line at an upscale grocery, he met Iris Mack.  One of the first African American women to get a Harvard Ph.D. in applied mathematics, Ms. Mack also worked at Enron and the Harvard Management Co.  Over the next 14 months, Rubin pursued her romantically.  They would meet, according to Mack, in his Ritz- Carlton Hotel suite, where he would stay after flying in on the Citigroup corporate jet.  "It’s one of the perks," Ms. Mack says Mr. Rubin told her.

• Mack enjoyed Rubin’s company.  :But the more I talked to him, I realized he was a good liar," she says.  "I point-blank asked the guy if he was married.  He never did answer a simple damn question.  He would say stuff like, ‘Well, are you married?  Have you ever been married?’  So it got to the point where I would still talk to him, but eventually I started ignoring him, or he would come down [and] I would lie and tell him I was out of town.  I just felt like the guy had a double personality."

For further details, go to [Bloomberg, 9/20/12].