All the Right Moves: Robert Rubin Goes Out on Top

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DOUG MILLS/AP

Clinton bids farewell to Rubin

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Of course, the ascendancy of stock-market culture -- and the global economic crisis -- would have happened to Lloyd Bentsen too, and the boom might have as well. But if Rubin was lifted by seismic changes in the world around him, he made adjustments of his own. Though Rubin and Greenspan are split on plenty of ideological issues (Rubin, like his boss, leans a lot farther left than his record indicates), the two talked more -- and got along better -- than any treasury secretary and fed chairman ever had. Rubin and Greenspan ran the global bucket brigade together, and it's a relationship that Rubin has made sure will live on in Larry Summers, his successor.

Inarguably, Rubin is leaving at the perfect time. The world economy has stabilized, the Dow has climbed over 11,000, and the U.S. boom shows few signs of busting anytime soon. But there are signs, and if things go sour Summers will catch the flak, in part because he'll make an easy target floating in Rubin's wake. Summers is a big brain -- a tenured professor at Harvard at age 28, chief economist at the World Bank not long after, IQ somewhere in the stratosphere -- but seemingly everything Rubin's not. Summers is the absent-minded professor, disheveled where Rubin is natty and plump where Rubin is trim. He also has a reputation for not suffering fools with even a pretense of gladness, and he and Clinton reportedly don't get along too famously. And to Wall Streeters, he's not one of them.

But Summers will get a long honeymoon, if only because he's Bob Rubin's boy. When he was still at Goldman Sachs, Rubin hired Summers as a consultant, and they've been together at Treasury since Rubin took over. In the six months or so that Rubin has been itching to get back to Park Avenue, Rubin has given Summers more and more responsibility (and ribbed him less and less in public). He's made Summers the point man on Treasury's foreign business, and taught him a few tricks about life in the Washington (and Wall Street) limelight. "Summers has a great relationship with Greenspan, and he's become very savvy about being a more political animal," says TIME senior economics correspondent Bernard Baumohl. "He'll continue the same programs and policies that he and Rubin put forward, and he loves the job. It should be a very smooth transition."

So what's next for Rubin? One rumor has it that he'll take over for Greenspan at the Fed (doubtful); another has him following his deep-dyed Democratic heart and running a nonprofit group to help more inner-city kids get educations (more likely). Others had him running for senator in New York (at least until Hillary butted in). At his farewell press conference (he'll leave town in July), Rubin merely said he was "going back to New York to do whatever I'm going to do next." At 60, he looks 50 and at the top of his game; he's also worth about $100 million, thanks to his days at Goldman, which should be just enough to pay his hotel bill after six years at the Jefferson. These days, Rubin gets asked a lot about whether he regrets leaving the brokerage firm now that it's gone public -- his $100 million would be up to around $400 million if he'd stayed. What Rubin is way too modest -- and way too smart -- to say, though, is that those kinds of returns might never have been possible had he not gone to Washington in the first place.

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