Gambling Man
by Lionel Barber · 3 Oct 2024 · 424pp · 123,730 words
/business sector: Black Monday stock market crash (1987), 108; Buffett on leverage, 297; buy-backs, 296, 297, 298–9, 300–301, 302; call options, 312; collapse of Lehman Brothers (15 September 2008), 194, 196, 197, 235; ‘conglomerate discount’, 295, 296, 308; Covid-19 emergency measures by central banks, 301–2, 312, 316; Dai-Ichi
Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead
by Kenneth Rogoff · 27 Feb 2025 · 330pp · 127,791 words
to be deliberately hyperbolic—at the time it seemed like the only sensible position. It was August 19, 2008, just a few weeks before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which marked the beginning of the most intense period of the global financial crisis. I was giving a speech to a conference held in Singapore
Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves
by Andrew Ross Sorkin · 15 Oct 2009 · 351pp · 102,379 words
Management. New York: Random House Trade Publishing, 2000. McDonald, Lawrence G., and Patrick Robinson, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers. New York: Crown Business, July 2009. Partnoy, Frank. Fiasco: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader. New York: Penguin, 1999. Schroeder, Alice. The Snowball
After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead
by Alan S. Blinder · 24 Jan 2013 · 566pp · 155,428 words
of little minds. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON The six months between the collapse of Bear Stearns into the waiting arms of JP Morgan Chase and the collapse of Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy was interesting, in the sense of the apocryphal Chinese curse. (May you live in interesting times.) In March the Federal Reserve, supported by
Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
by Satyajit Das · 14 Oct 2011 · 741pp · 179,454 words
the global financial crisis have been written by those who only became wise after the event. Das is not one of them. Long before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, he warned about the flaws in modern finance. Extreme Money is his account of what went wrong. Read it!” —Edward Chancellor, Member of GMO’s
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. Securitization and derivatives shifted assets off-balance sheet, but liquidity puts and standby funding arrangements meant that the risk remained with the bank. Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, a court-appointed examiner found that the investment bank used repos (repurchase agreements) to shift assets off-balance sheet.40 In a repo, the borrower
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in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.” In South Korea an online blogger, using the pseudonym Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, predicted the imminent collapse of Lehman Brothers and made dire forecasts about the South Korean currency (the won), his site registering 40 million hits. When the won fell 26 percent, an unimpressed
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fruitful employment to authors explaining the theories (in good times) and debunking them (in bad times). Journalists rush out blow-by-blow accounts of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the subsequent financial market meltdown. Hastily written histories of firms and banking figures as well as personal perspectives and memoirs proliferate. Many find links
The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire
by Neil Irwin · 4 Apr 2013 · 597pp · 172,130 words
damning by faint praise, but a catastrophe averted is no small thing. The central bankers’ judgments were far from perfect, and their mistakes—allowing the collapse of Lehman Brothers, endorsing early fiscal austerity in Britain, moving with such hesitation and delay in the face of the eurozone crisis—will do lasting economic damage. Each
Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition
by Kindleberger, Charles P. and Robert Z., Aliber · 9 Aug 2011
Race to the Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System. Lawrence McDonald wrote A Colossal Failure of Common Sense; the Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers, his former employer. William D. Cohan, a former banker turned journalist, brought out House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall
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in the first half of 2008; the first negative quarter was the third quarter of 2008 – and even then the decline was modest. Then the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 triggered a panic and a crash. The credit system froze; interest rate spreads surged, and LIBOR increased by 500 basis points relative
A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers
by Lawrence G. Mcdonald and Patrick Robinson · 21 Jul 2009 · 430pp · 140,405 words
This book is respectfully dedicated to the many thousands of Lehman employees whose lives were thrown into turmoil when the firm collapsed, and among whom I was privileged to work for the four best years of my life. Contents Prologue 1 A Rocky Road to Wall Street 2 Scaring Morgan Stanley to Death 3 Only the Bears Smiled 4 The Man in the Ivory Tower 5 A Miracle on the Waterway 6 The Day Delta Air Lines Went Bust 7 The Tragedy of General Motors 8 The Mortgage Bonanza Blows Out 9 King Richard Thunders Forward 10 A $100 Million Crash for Subprime’s Biggest Beast 11 Wall Street Stunned as Kirk Quits 12 Fuld, Defiant to the End Epilogue Acknowledgments Cast of Characters Lehman Brothers (31st Floor) / Members of the Executive Committee Richard S. Fuld Jr.: chairman of the board and chief executive officer Joseph Gregory: president and chief operating officer David Goldfarb: former chief financial officer; former global head of principal investing; chief strategy officer Christopher O’Meara: chief financial officer, 2005–07; chief risk officer Erin Callan: managing director and head of hedge fund investment banking; chief financial officer, 2007–08 George Walker IV: managing director and global head of investment management Ian Lowitt: chief administrative officer; chief financial officer, 2008 Lehman Brothers (Traders, Investment Bankers, Risktakers, Salespeople) Michael Gelband: managing director and global head of fixed income; head of capital markets; member of the executive committee Alex Kirk: managing director and global head of high-yield and leveraged-loan businesses; chief operating officer of fixed income; global head of principal investing Herbert “Bart” McDade: managing director and global head of fixed income; global head of equities; president, 2008; member of the executive committee Eric Felder: managing director and head of global credit products group; global head of fixed income Dr. Madelyn Antoncic: managing director and chief risk officer; government liaison Thomas Humphrey: managing director and global head of fixed-income sales Hugh “Skip” McGee: managing director and global head of investment banking Richard Gatward: managing director and global head of convertible trading and sales Lawrence E. McCarthy: managing director and global head of distressed-debt trading Joseph Beggans: senior vice president, distressed-debt trading Peter Schellbach: managing director, distressed-loan trading Terence Tucker: senior vice president, convertible securities sales David Gross: senior vice president, convertible securities sales Jeremiah Stafford: senior vice president, high-yield credit products trading Lawrence G. McDonald: vice president, distressed-debt and convertible securities trading Mohammed “Mo” Grimeh: managing director and global head of emerging markets trading Steven Berkenfeld: managing director and chairman, investment banking commitments committee Lehman Brothers (Research and Analysis) Christine Daley: managing director and head of distressed-debt research Jane Castle: managing director, distressed-debt research Peter Hammack: vice president, credit derivatives research Ashish Shah: managing director and head of credit strategies, derivatives, and research Karim Babay: associate, convertible securities research Shrinivas Modukuri: managing director, mortgage-backed securities research Lehman Brothers (Mortgage and Real Estate) David N. Sherr: managing director and global head of securitized products Mark Walsh: managing director and global head of commercial real estate group Lehman Brothers Family and Former Lehman Brothers Partners Robert “Bobbie” Lehman: chairman, 1925–69, and the last of the brothers to head the firm Christopher Pettit: president and chief operating officer, 1994–96 John Cecil: chief administrative officer, chief financial officer, 1994–2000 Bradley Jack: president and chief operating officer, 2002–04 Peter G. Peterson: former chief executive officer; former U.S. secretary of commerce; founding partner of the Blackstone Group Steve Schwarzman: former investment banker; founding partner of the Blackstone Group Senior Government Officials and Banking/Investment Industry VIPs Henry M. Paulson Jr.: former CEO of Goldman Sachs; former secretary of the U.S. Treasury Ben Bernanke: chairman, U.S. Federal Reserve Timothy F. Geithner: former president, Federal Reserve Bank of New York; secretary of the U.S. Treasury Jamie Dimon: chief executive officer, JPMorganChase David Einhorn: founder, Greenlight Capital John Devaney: chairman and chief executive officer, United Capital Management Corporate Financial Personnel Anand Iyer: managing director and global head of convertible securities research, Morgan Stanley Tony Bosco: managing director, convertible securities trading, Morgan Stanley, acquisitions Gary Begnaud: Philadelphia branch manager, Merrill Lynch Family and Friends Lawrence G. McDonald Sr.: father, investor, golfer Debbie Towle McDonald O’Brien: mother, fashion model Ed O’Brien: stepfather and lawyer Bob Cousy: family friend; point guard, Boston Celtics Steve Seefeld: best friend at Falmouth High and Wharton; partner, ConvertBond.com Kate Bohner: longtime friend and television financial journalist Jack Corbett: longtime friend and successful retail stockbroker Fallen Angels Jeff Skilling: president and chief executive officer, Enron Angelo R. Mozilo: chairman and chief executive officer, Countrywide Financial Author’s Note It’s been said that there are two distinct groups of people in America: “Wall Street” and “Main Street”—the former composed of people who keep the financial plumbing of the latter in good condition so that everyone will prosper. Wall Street has, however, become increasingly complex and opaque, and many on Main Street have only the most basic notion of what it does. In addition, Wall Street, particularly with the collapse and bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, was the epicenter of the worldwide financial crises that brought the global economy close to a complete collapse. My objective in writing A Colossal Failure of Common Sense was twofold. First, to provide Main Street with a close-up, inside view of how markets really work by someone who was on the trading floor in the years leading up to Lehman Brothers’ calamitous end. And, second, to give my colleagues on Wall Street as crystal clear an explanation as possible about the real reasons why the legendary Lehman Brothers met with such a swift ending. The lessons therein are important for beginning to understand how we can prevent such disasters in the future and ultimately do a better job of serving Main Street. —Lawrence G. McDonald, July 2009 A house divided against itself cannot stand. Abraham Lincoln, June 16, 1858 Prologue I STILL LIVE just a few city blocks away from the old Lehman Brothers headquarters at 745 Seventh Avenue—six blocks, and about ten thousand years. I still walk past it two or three times a week, and each time I try to look forward, south toward Wall Street. And I always resolve to keep walking, glancing neither left nor right, locking out the memories. But I always stop. And I see again the light blue livery of Barclays Capital, which represents—for me, at least—the flag of an impostor, a pale substitute for the swashbuckling banner that for 158 years was slashed above the entrance to the greatest merchant bank Wall Street ever knew: Lehman Brothers. It was only the fourth largest. But its traditions were those of a banking warrior—the brilliant finance house that had backed, encouraged, and made possible the retail giants Gimbel Brothers, F. W Woolworth, and Macy’s, and the airlines American, National, TWA, and Pan American. They raised the capital for Campbell Soup Company, the Jewel Tea Company, B. F. Goodrich. And they backed the birth of television at RCA, plus the Hollywood studios RKO, Paramount, and 20th Century Fox. They found the money for the Trans-Canada oil pipeline. I suppose, in a sense, I had seen only its demise, the four-year death rattle of twenty-first-century finance, which ended on September 15, 2008. Yet in my mind, I remember the great days. And as I come to a halt outside the building, I know too that in the next few moments I will be engulfed by sadness. But I always stop. And I always stare up at the third floor, where once I worked as a trader on one of the toughest trading floors on earth. And then I find myself counting all the way up to thirty-one, the floor where it all went so catastrophically wrong, the floor that housed the royal court of King Richard. That’s Richard S. Fuld, chairman and CEO. Swamped by nostalgia, edged as we all are by a lingering anger, and still plagued by unanswerable questions, I stand and stare upward, sorrowful beyond reason, and trapped by the twin words of those possessed of flawless hindsight: if only. Sometimes I lie awake at night trying to place all the if-onlys in some kind of order. Sometimes the order changes, and sometimes there is a new leader, one single aspect of the Lehman collapse that stands out above all others. But it’s never clear. Except when I stand right here and look up at the great glass fortress which once housed Lehman, and focus on that thirty-first floor. Then it’s clear. Boy is it ever clear. And the phrase if only slams into my brain. If only they had listened—Dick Fuld and his president, Joe Gregory. Three times they were hit with the irredeemable logic of three of the cleverest financial brains on Wall Street—those of Mike Gelband, our global head of fixed income, Alex Kirk, global head of distressed trading research and sales, and Larry McCarthy, head of distressed-bond trading. Each and every one of them laid it out, from way back in 2005, that the real estate market was living on borrowed time and that Lehman Brothers was headed directly for the biggest subprime iceberg ever seen, and with the wrong men on the bridge. Dick and Joe turned their backs all three times. It was probably the worst triple since St. Peter denied Christ. Beyond that, there were six more if-onlys, each one as cringe-makingly awful as the last. If only Chairman Fuld had kept his ear close to the ground on the inner workings of his firm—both its triumphs and its mistakes. If he had listened to his generals, met people who formed the heart and soul of Lehman Brothers, the catastrophe might have been avoided. But instead of this, he secluded himself in his palatial offices up there on the thirty-first floor, remote from the action, dreaming only of accelerating growth, nursing ambitions far removed from reality. If only the secret coup against Fuld and Gregory had taken place months before that clandestine meeting in June 2008. If the eleven managing directors who sat in ostensibly treasonous but ultimately loyal comradeship that night had acted sooner and removed the Lehman leaders, they might have steadied the ship, changing its course. If only the reign of terror that drove out the most brilliant of Lehman’s traders and risk takers had been halted earlier, perhaps in the name of common sense. The top managers might have marshaled their forces immediately when they saw giants such as Mike Gelband being ignored. If only Dick Fuld had kept his anger, resentment, and rudeness under control. Especially at that private dinner in the spring of 2008 with Hank Paulson, secretary of the United States Treasury. That was when Fuld’s years of smoldering envy of Goldman Sachs came cascading to the surface and caused Paulson to leave furious that the Lehman boss had disrespected the office he held. Perhaps that was the moment Hank decided he could not bring himself to bail out the bank controlled by Richard S. Fuld. If only President George W. Bush had taken the final, desperate call from Fuld’s office, a call made by his own cousin, George Walker IV, in the night hours before the bank filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It might have made a difference. If only … if only. Those two words haunt my dreams. I go back to the fall of Lehman, and what might have made things different. For most people, victims or not of this worldwide collapse of the financial markets, it will be, in time, just water over the dam. But it will never be that for me, and my long background as a trader and researcher has prompted me many times to burrow down further to the bedrock, the cause of the crash of 2008. I refer to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. If only President Clinton had never signed the bill repealing Glass-Steagall. Personally, I never thought he much wanted to sign it, but to understand the ramifications it is necessary to delve deeper, and before I begin my story, I will present you with some critical background information, without which your grasp might be incomplete. It’s a ten-minute meadow of wisdom and hindsight, the sort of thing I tend to specialize in. The story begins in the heady, formative years of the Clinton presidency on a rose-colored quest to change the world, to help the poor, and ended in the poisonous heartland of world financial disaster. Roberta Achtenberg, the daughter of a Russian-born owner of a Los Angeles neighborhood grocery store, was plucked by President Clinton from relative obscurity in 1993 and elevated to the position of assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Roberta and Bill were united in their desire to increase home ownership in poor and minority communities. And despite a barrage of objections led by Senator Jesse Helms, who referred to Achtenberg as that “damn lesbian,” the lady took up her appointment in the new administration, citing innate racism as one of the main reasons why banks were reluctant to lend to those without funds. In the ensuing couple of years, Roberta Achtenberg harnessed all of the formidable energy on the massed ranks of United States bankers, sometimes threatening, sometimes berating, sometimes bullying—anything to persuade the banks to provide mortgages to people who might not have been up to the challenge of coping with up-front down payments and regular monthly payments. Between 1993 and 1999, more than two million such clients became new homeowners. In her two-year tenure as assistant secretary, she set up a national grid of offices staffed by attorneys and investigators. Their principal aim was to enforce the laws against the banks, the laws that dealt with discrimination. Some of the fines leveled at banks ran into the millions, to drive home Achtenberg’s avowed intent to utilize the law to change the ethos of providing mortgage money in the United States of America. Banks were compelled to jump into line, and soon they were making thousands of loans without any cash-down deposits whatsoever, an unprecedented situation. Mortgage ...
Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present
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FULD’S AMBITION COULD NOW BE FULLY UNLEASHED: Lawrence G. McDonald with Patrick Robinson, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers (New York: Crown, 2009), pp. 136–38. 37 AT A MANAGEMENT MEETING: Ibid., pp. 268–69. 38 IN THE FACE OF GROWING RISK: Ibid., pp
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market without affecting prices? Has anyone spoken to any of his counterparties [buyers and sellers on the opposite sides of trades]….” Of note, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers but before Madoff was exposed, Optimal sent a letter to all its investors to assure them that the fund has “actively monitored” its brokers, “as
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