Where's Vikram?

Ken Lewis has had quite a day. It started with news that the Bank of America chief executive was subpoenaed by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo over the Merrill Lynch losses and bonuses.

Then the market clobbered shares of the bank as fears of nationalization spread like a forest fire in 60-mile-per-hour winds. A Wall Street Journal article reported that Lewis addressed the rumors during a meeting on Thursday by saying that administration officials have assured him that nationalization isn't an option and he urged them to do so publicly.

But they haven't. And so, with Bank of America shares down 25 percent, Lewis took to the airwaves himself again, issuing a statement that the bank is on solid footing financially. Moreover, he indicated, the people who are speculating about nationalization simply don't know what they are talking about.

It all feels dangerously like the desperate days before the fall of Lehman and Bear Stearns. But there's one character conspicuously absent from this act: Citigroup's Vikram Pandit.

Citigroup, as banking analyst Meredith Whitney emphasized on CNBC yesterday, is arguably the most vulnerable of the big banks. Its shares are down 27 percent today, now comfortably below the $2 mark. Its market capitalization is inching down to $10 billion -- the U.S. government theoretically could have purchased four Citigroups with the $45 billion in TARP money it's poured into it so far.

Perhaps Pandit is ready to forfeit and his silence is the equivalent of waving the white flag. Or perhaps he's trying a different tact than Lewis -- after all, the 11th hour pleas from Bear and Lehman executives only seemed to make matters worse.

by Megan Barnett