Lehman Brothers doesn't fall

  • Thread starter Deleted member 1487
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I'm not so sure that Fuld was an asshole. From my understanding, he had come up through Lehman Brothers, and was very much a company man, committed to doing everything he could to protect Lehman. Mistakes? Yes. Asshole? No.

His real problem was in allowing Joe Gregory so much decision making power, and in selecting a VERY weak CFO in Erin Callan. I'm no expert, of course, that's just my perception.
 
I'm not so sure that Fuld was an asshole. From my understanding, he had come up through Lehman Brothers, and was very much a company man, committed to doing everything he could to protect Lehman. Mistakes? Yes. Asshole? No.

His real problem was in allowing Joe Gregory so much decision making power, and in selecting a VERY weak CFO in Erin Callan. I'm no expert, of course, that's just my perception.

No, he was a total asshole. Look up a book called 'A Collossal Failure of Common Sense' by a guy called Lawrence McDonald, who used to work at Lehman. It left me stunned and incredibly angry. Fuld and Gregory kept pushing Lehman's real estate people to add to their property portfolio, even though they were a) adding to the total debt burden and b) buying at the top of the fucking market, pardon my language please. And even when Gregory was given the black spot Fuld was still all at sea, telling people to see their problems as opportunities. Yeah right.
 
The problem is that Dick Fuld would have needed a Damascene conversion to get signed up to the fact that he needed to do something drastic and lose some control at the same time. I've read up quite a bit about Fuld, and it strikes me that he was a total asshole.

If he was the roadblock to a rescue plan how likely is it that he could have been pressured to stand down by the Treasury, SEC and shareholders?
 
If he was the roadblock to a rescue plan how likely is it that he could have been pressured to stand down by the Treasury, SEC and shareholders?

He would have had to be sidelined before the Paulson bailout so that he couldn't stuff up the few rescue opportunities that were available at that time. Yes, Lehman Brothers was in a pretty bad state thanks to mistakes by Fuld and Gregory, but Paulson's initial decision not to intervene in the crisis shot the company in the heart. Once people realised that Lehman would not be bailed out the panic got worse, the contagion moved on and the hole deepened. If Paulson had offered Fuld a bailout, he'd have taken it.
 
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