Wriston

Wriston is the inside story of the man who delivered Citibank into the global arena - and brought it to the edge of the abyss. Wriston is the story of how one visionary rose to the top of a giant but sleepy First National City, later renamed Citibank, and set about reinventing not only his own institution, but much of banking and finance in the United States and the world. An apostle of free market economics, he challenged the wisdom of institutions from the White House and Congress to the Federal Reserve and other big banks. Sometimes winning, sometimes losing, he succeeded in revolutionizing consumer banking, the use of bank credit cards, and interstate banking and in partially dismantling bank regulation. He was widely criticized for leading the charge in lending billions to Third World countries. In researching Wriston, Phillip L. Zweig interviewed dozens of the movers and shakers of the time - including former President Gerald Ford, former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Secretaries of the Treasury Connally, Simon, and Regan, former Fed chairmen William Miller and Paul Volker, and, of course, Walter Wriston himself.