Today’s Financial Times reported that earlier this summer, federal regulators secretly and successfully pressured Citigroup to replace its CFO.

Although shareholders, lenders, and other interest parties suspected that regulatory heft — buoyed by the government’s 34 percent ownership in Citi — was behind the change, they did not know so until today.

We still don’t really know, though, how much control the government enjoys at Citi, vs. how much control the financial giant’s nominally private-sector managers enjoy.

This lack of clear accountability will benefit the politicians. The pols inevitably will learn to use Citi to achieve political ends, with the fingerprints too smudged to draw a clear connection back to them.

It will also benefit Citi’s executives. They’ll enjoy financial success and insulation from market forces, as long as they understand that their jobs require them to serve as the quiet handmaidens of political favors. They also must serve as the political class’s useful human media and public distractions from the politicians’ own culpability in whatever financial scandal is bothering everyone at a given moment.

But don’t shareholders and lenders care that no one is really accountable?

Not really.

Lenders care only that their investments enjoy the government’s “too-big-to-fail guarantee.” Longtime shareholders are too depressed to care about anything anymore, while new shareholders got in at such a low price that there only seems to be upside.

For an object lesson in how dangerous and demoralizing this system of political control without the required political accountability can be, just look to New York.

The Empire State’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which runs New York City’s buses and subways, is not that different from Citigroup, in that it’s a supposedly independent, corporate-style public authority that enjoys the perception of a government guarantee.

Last week, the MTA consummated an embarrassingly profligate deal with its largest labor union, and yet the political class has largely escaped accountability.

Because the MTA is supposedly independent of political forces, Governor Paterson can adeptly deflect attention away from his responsibility for the deal, although the powerful transit union, of course, knows to be thankful.

Meanwhile, the MTA’s own management bureaucracy plays its role only too well. The MTA itself largely serves as a distracting generator of incompetence and intrigue, so the media doesn’t focus consistently on the fact that it’s the elected pols who are only to happy to give away the store at the expense of actual investment in transit and in the city’s economy.

Do we really want the global financial industry — necessarily affected by Citi’s outsized, government-guaranteed role — to be subject to the same poisonous and demoralizing political and public-policy dynamics as New York’s MTA?

Of course not.

And we can avoid this outcome.

– Nicole Gelinas, Manhattan Institute senior fellow, is author of the forthcoming After The Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street — and Washington.