Dark suit, two-tone shirt, red tie, slick-backed hair. William Rhodes still looks every bit the international banker he was for more than half a century before retiring from Citigroup in May 2010.
But at a cocktail reception celebrating his new book about his career, Rhodes was nearly upstaged by perhaps the only man in the world who can wear a necktie that stops at the navel and nonetheless cut the most commanding figure in a room of 150 well-dressed New Yorkers.
Standing off to the side, without opening his mouth, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker handily captivated the room just by making himself present. Of course it helps that he's 6 feet 7 inches tall.
Volcker wrote the foreword to Rhodes's new book, Banker to the World: Leadership Lessons from the Front Lines of Global Finance, and he pops up in several chapters as Rhodes recounts the international debt crises he helped Citi navigate in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. "It is not too much to suggest," Volcker wrote in the foreword, "that events forced us into a certain mutual dependency, a dependency growing out of our common concern about threats to the American—and the global—banking system."
In welcoming well-wishers to the book party, Rhodes, who turns 76 this month, said Volcker was one of the two great mentors in his 53-year career with Citi, along with the late Citicorp Chairman Walter Wriston, whose widow, Kathy, was in attendance. Wriston taught Rhodes about banking, Volcker about policy.
In the circles they traveled, Rhodes said, Wriston frequently was referred to as "the tallest banker" and Volcker as "the tallest regulator"-nicknames that no doubt referred to each man's figurative stature as much as his literal height.
Rhodes, meanwhile, has a frame as wiry as his glasses, and that evening on the 50th floor of the Manhattan headquarters of his publisher, McGraw-Hill, he spoke with the unmistakable trace of the Long Island boyhood that preceded all of the debt negotiations in Latin American hotspots and the groundbreaking business deals in China and post-apartheid South Africa. ("They had me woiking pretty hard around the woild.")
It was a fitting voice to deliver what was an ultimately hard-nosed message about fiscal austerity.
Though the U.S. dollar is the world's reserve currency, a government "spending spree" and worsening deficits are cause for concern, warned Rhodes, a former Citi senior vice chairman. "Time is running against us here in the U.S."
