We all knew it was coming. Most of us had known for a week, but that did not lessen the shock of the news that Lehman Brothers was no more. In the small hours of Monday 15 September, Richard S Fuld, our isolated and obdurate chairman, had filed for bankruptcy, ending 158 years of Wall Street for what was, arguably, the finest merchant bank in US history.
The shock reverberated among the 26,000 employees of Lehman, but when I use the word “we”, I refer only to the men and women who strove for more than two and a half years to save the bank from the follies of the 31st floor, where King Fuld and his cohorts had resolutely steered Lehman head-on into an iceberg. It was pathetic, really. Even the Titanic swerved.
The most important players were Mike Gelband, managing director and global head of fixed income; Alex Kirk, managing director and global head of high-yield and leveraged loans; and my immediate boss and best friend, Larry McCarthy, managing director and global head of distressed bond trading. Then there was Richard Gatward, managing director and global head of convertible securities trading; Christine Daley, managing director and head of distressed debt research; Madelyn Antoncic, managing director and chief risk officer; and myself.
Most of these brave leaders implored the chairman, and our president Joe Gregory, to change course. In the end every one of us was fired, sidelined, moved away from the action or somehow got rid of. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were watching the death throes of Lehman Brothers, as one by one the greatest financiers in the building went.
Throughout the long weekend before the collapse, all of us, now on the outside, were taking blow-by-blow calls as Fuld and his cronies struggled to persuade the government to save them. Monday 15 September started for us at about 5am, and my mobile never stopped ringing. Three times I had to charge the battery. Over and over we rang each other, unable to believe what had happened, that Lehman Brothers was gone. I just remember there was so much to say, and so much that would never be said.
We who had made the bank’s fortune mostly sat alone in our apartments, dumbfounded by the news channels, watching our world crash around our ears. Nothing else seemed to matter. No other stories were even being covered. On every channel the bank we loved was being shown, surrounded by journalists and engulfed by a sorrow that none of them understood.
I remember there was a threat of rain in the morning – even the skies seemed to weep for Lehman Brothers – but as if to convince myself that it really had happened, I left my apartment and walked the six blocks to the old office at 745 Seventh Avenue. I pushed my way through the journalists, my mobile pressed to my ear, talking to my old boss Larry McCarthy. And I stood outside and stared up at the fourth floor – the trading floor of the great bank – where we had battled away for almost four years, shoulder to shoulder. I think I smiled to myself. For the good times.
But then I looked up to the 31st floor, where all the damage was done. And I’m not ashamed to say that my eyes welled up at the sheer stupidity of it. I walked away for the last time, the shouts of reporters ringing in my ears. “Did you work at Lehman Brothers?” “What are you feeling now?” “What’s the mood like among the staff?” “Who do you blame for this?” “What are you going to do next?” I was appalled by their sense of entitlement, soundbites as the collapse of Lehman Brothers heralded the crash of the world economy. And they wondered what the bloody mood was like.
On the anniversary of that dark day, much of the financial carnage remains – the sub-prime crisis that caused it, the commercial real-estate crash that worsened it, still a billion acres of concrete unsold, unsellable, held together by government cash and promises. Great buildings remain half empty. The dust is clearing, but only slowly.
And yet I cannot avoid the feeling that even if we have not yet reached the sunlit uplands of prosperity, we are at least climbing the hill and no one is out of breath. Lehman Brothers has been largely absorbed by Barclays, though the $660bn debt may take years to unwind. My little team of people who could have saved Lehman has dispersed to smaller, more manageable and certainly more careful financial institutions. I have been given a position in a new and very conservative financial organisation. By nature, I am sometimes a bear, and I have remained sceptical about the latest bull market during which the Dow Jones Industrial Average has surged by 3,000 points. But I am optimistic that the world will recover as quickly as many are hoping.
The Lehman collapse cost me much of my savings – seven figures – but I intend to get it back. My former colleagues and I are still on the line to one another, just like the old days, still swapping information, and warnings, trying to be helpful. Just a group of old comrades who once fought together.
The 15th of September will always be a date in infamy. I try to persuade myself that the bank collapse is behind me. But it never will be, and I expect I’ll stroll round to the old building some time during the day and glance up again. Just for the good times’ sake.
Lawrence G McDonald is the author, with Patrick Robinson, of “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: the Incredible Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers”, published by Ebury Press (£7.99)
www.lawrencegmcdonald.com
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