SEOUL, South Korea – Vikram S. Pandit, the chief executive of Citigroup, isn’t feeling the love.  At a gathering here of top executives in the G-20 Business Summit, a parallel gathering alongside the meeting of leaders from the Group of 20 economic powers, Mr. Pandit suggested that the environment for financial companies in the United States was rather frosty  “I kind of feel like I’m living in parallel universes,” Mr. Pandit said in a forum that included Peter Sands of Standard Chartered Bank and Stephen A. Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group. “I’m here in Korea and I feel this warmth and need and the sense of trying to have a dialogue with each other, but then when I get back to my real universe, it’s cold in that universe.”  Mr. Pandit raised concerns about the new Basel III bank capital standards that the G-20 leaders were expected to endorse on Friday. Like many in the financial industry, he warned that the new standards, which will require banks to hold more and higher-quality capital, could dampen or distort economic growth without necessarily improving financial stability.  “We can all agree that higher capital ratios were in order, lower leverage, and I think we can all agree that higher-risk areas should require capital, and I think those are all the things that Basel is trying to address,” he said. “In some ways it’s done a pretty good job, but the real question comes around: Have we gotten it right in terms of calibration of risk? Have we gotten it right in terms of how we measure risk?”  Mr. Pandit also said he believed the Basel process had left vulnerabilities, saying that the use of pro-cyclical capital buffers required improvement. “ I don’t think we’ve really addressed some of those things,” he said.  He added: “We expect and we hope to see a lot more dialogue in getting to the right kind of calibration.”
On the sidelines of the G-20 summit meeting, Citigroup's chief says he's stumbled on a parallel universe where banks are loved, not shunned.