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Article: Juicy: Orange County. (treasurer Robert Citron claims that he led county into bankruptcy protection because of poor advice by Merrill Lynch)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- January 21, 1995
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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WAS he a savvy financial whizz or a brow-beaten public servant led astray by cynical Wall Street advisers? For most of his 24 years as a professional money manager, Robert Citron, the former treasurer and tax collector of Orange County, whose $7.4 billion investment portfolio was ravaged by $2 billion-worth of losses in December (though the figure has since been pared to $1.7 billion), was very much the former: the wheeler-dealer veteran of the local-government investment game.
On January 17th, however, in his first public utterance since Orange County was forced to seek bankruptcy protection, Mr Citron painted himself as an innocent neophyte who relied on advice from ...