The arrogance and self-dealing of some members of the Wall Street-Washington complex is crystallized in Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

Mr. Rubin, an ex-Goldman Sachs chief, as Treasury secretary helped push various deregulatory schemes, most especially the ending of the Glass-Steagall Act (which had wisely separated investment and commercial banks) and various other moves that helped him and his Wall Street friends while undermining the stability of the financial markets and the general economy.

After he did his government (self) service, Mr. Rubin joined Citigroup (which taxpayers are bailing out), where he got a job with vast compensation that did not require any direct operational work, but for which he has been paid $115 million since 1999 (excluding stock options).

He is an exemplar of the fixer who has moved between government and business to maximize his wealth and power. While Mr. Rubin has been at Citigroup, as “senior counselor,” he and his pals reaped as much as they could from the proliferation of grotesquely opaque (some law-enforcement types might call it worse) financial devices and maneuverings, whose effects have become all too clear.

Indeed, Mr. Rubin and his colleagues have helped cause catastrophe. But such is the silky-voiced Mr. Rubin’s self-love that he told The Wall Street Journal (which has editorialized against his self-enriching conflicts of interest), in tones of deep self-sacrifice, that “I bet there’s not a single year where I couldn’t have gone somewhere else and made more.”

A. He was obscenely overpaid, and Citigroup shareholders should be infuriated. B. There’s little to suggest that he wouldn’t have gone somewhere else if they gave him as much money and as little work to do as Citigroup gave him to do. What a con man.