Here's one definition of chutzpah. Or, more accurately, an exemplary instance of it: a young man murders both of his parents...and appeals to the judge in his trial for clemency on the grounds that he's an orphan.
Sanford Weill's brazen instance of chutzpah is of a different sort. He's an expert at screwing up all sorts of financial institutions (after making billions from them). Thursday's Wall Street Journal reports "Weill Seeks to Gain from Pain: Consider Fund to Invest in Battered Financials." The reporter for the WSJ, David Enrich (a fine name for a financial journalist), tells us that Weill and his two potential partners, Michael Masin and Michael Klein, were a trio at the top of Citigroup, about which grim gossip has been floating in Wall Street for months. Like about Lehman.
In any case, these three men, having put together an enormous counting house consortium so big and complex that not even they understood what they had wrought, now think themselves expert in cure and repair. Apparently, the Citigroup board does not agree, at least about Weil. After his hand-picked successor was forced out, he "volunteered to return to the company...Citigroup directors declines his offer."
It is true that Weil is a generous citizen of New York, having given hundreds of millions to Weill Cornell Medical College-New York Hospital and I don't how much (but lots) to Carnegie Hall. Maybe he should rest with his good works.