I crewed on a sailboat in YRA races leading up to and during the 2008-9 crash. It was mostly people from Lehman and Barclays. I was the only SV guy on the boat.
No one partied harder than those guys but then they really only partied with themselves. It was kinda like Boiler Room. The Dot Com boom is the stuff of legends but these guys left nothing on the table.
Barclays had a riff and ordered a string of cabs to take people home. One of them stepped into the cab and said Vegas.
For all that they were wrong about everything. Highly paid, quite sure of themselves but wrong. Basically they were poker players (and they played a lot of poker) but they weren’t very good. It was just other people’s money so who cared.
Someone from Korea (S. Korea of course) told me this story that he read in a South Korean newspaper.
When Lehman was trying desperately to sell themselves in order to get more funding in 2008, one place they tried it was in S Korea. Lehman's ex head of Korean office was in a high place in Korean banking industry at the time.
Supposedly some local press was painting it like it was going to be a great chance for a Korean bank to own the famous Lehman. Probably due to well placed phone calls.
So Lehman's ceo and his management team came to S. Korea to work the deal. Like 10 guys.
Guess what, the CEO and his entourage had NOT 1 piece of paper to show during the negotiation. For a deal that was to involve billions of dollars, the seller had not prepare even 1 piece of paper to show to the potential buyer/funder about anything.
To me this suggests
1. Lehman management was really full of it and thought they could swindle S. Korean to throw money into a black hole, despite not having done any prep work on their part.
2. Lehman management was just going through the motions, while fully knowing they were doomed.
I mean if you know that your company is worthless, that is probably not a good thing to print out in the first place. But it is quite absurd nonetheless.
There should be a special place in hell for Dick Fuld. It is amazing to me that he, above anyone else, didn't go to jail considering he directly lied to shareholders regarding Lehman's leverage.
And all the movies about those folks show the same right? We, the norms, get to live vicariously through their partying, dishonesty, stupidity, etc then the fall comes and we get to laugh at them too. But secretly, we all think we can beat the fall part and have the fun, right? Or at least, in the US.
No one partied harder than those guys but then they really only partied with themselves. It was kinda like Boiler Room. The Dot Com boom is the stuff of legends but these guys left nothing on the table.
Barclays had a riff and ordered a string of cabs to take people home. One of them stepped into the cab and said Vegas.
For all that they were wrong about everything. Highly paid, quite sure of themselves but wrong. Basically they were poker players (and they played a lot of poker) but they weren’t very good. It was just other people’s money so who cared.
They didn’t learn anything.