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February 11, 2009

TARP Accountability Hearing: Nazgûl say, "What Me, Sorry?"

There should be lots of grandstanding, fireworks and acrimony Wednesday at the House Financial Services Committee hearing on TARP Accountability -- and that's just among the politicians. Wait until they get their hooks into the assembled bank CEOS. Anyway, you'll be able to watch it all here live starting at 10am EST.

The names of the eight bank CEOs in attendance follow -- hey, one more CEO and we would have Tolkien's nine Nazgûl (which would explain much) -- along with links to their pre-released prepared remarks:

• Mr. Lloyd C. Blankfein, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman, Goldman Sachs & Co.
• Mr. James Dimon, Chief Executive Officer, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
• Mr. Robert P. Kelly, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Bank of New York Mellon
• Mr. Ken Lewis, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Bank of America
• Mr. Ronald E. Logue, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, State Street Corporation
• Mr. John J. Mack, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Morgan Stanley
• Mr. Vikram Pandit, Chief Executive Officer, Citigroup
• Mr. John Stumpf, President and Chief Executive Officer, Wells Fargo & Co.

In scanning the 9,726 words of bank CEO blather there was, as always, no sign of "sorry", "we f**ked up", "mistake", "error" or even "whoops" as far as the eye can read. Check the following, by way of example:

Finally, and you knew this was coming, here is a tag cloud of the most-used words in the aggregated remarks from the assembled bank/broker  CEOs:

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