Walter Wriston Quotes
The Doomsayers have always had their uses, since they trigger the coping mechanism that often prevents the events they forecast.
Wriston, Walter B. Risk and Other Four-Letter Words. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
Ironically, he had to drop out of the presidential nomination race because he was immersed in a personal scandal that erupted. He could not cope with it. Had he taken his own advice and dealt with it BEFORE the crises erupted, he might have weathered the storm. But he waited and was caught flat-footed.
His message is that man has to do something to produce solutions. Problems will come inevitability.
Walter Bigelow Wriston was a banker and former chairman and CEO of Citicorp. As chief executive of Citibank / Citicorp (later Citigroup) from 1967 to 1984, Wriston was widely regarded as the single most influential commercial banker of his time. During his tenure as CEO, the bank introduced, among other innovations, automated teller machines, interstate banking, the negotiable certificate of deposit, and "pursued the credit card business in a way that no other bank was doing at the time". With then New York Governor Hugh Carey and investment banker Felix Rohatyn, Wriston helped save New York City from bankruptcy in the mid-1970s by setting up the Financial Control Board and the Municipal Assistance Corporation, and persuading the city's union pension funds and banks to buy the latter corporation's bonds.
