Back to John Gapper's Business Blog homepageI have written a column for the FT on Monday on the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Here are the first few paragraphs:
In Greed and Glory on Wall Street, Ken Auletta’s book about the last time Lehman Brothers collapsed, in 1984, Richard Fuld appears as the fierce, proud, introverted head of bond trading. Even at the end, after internal feuding had brought the firm to a halt, he resisted the idea that it had to be sold.
In the end it was sold to American Express and Mr Fuld later became its chief executive. He reformed Lehman as an independent bank in 1994 and never appeared to look back, defying the sceptics who said Lehman would always remain in the shadow of Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs.
Lehman changed because Mr Fuld insisted that it had to. He eliminated the internal arguments by relentlessly pushing the idea of teamwork. He expanded the bank’s operations, building up its asset management and equities operations to balance its powerhouse of bond trading.
But Mr Fuld never changed, not really. He was still the same dark, obstinate Lehman loyalist that he had always been – a man who never wanted his firm to be sold. And, in the end, Mr Fuld’s pride and obstinacy stood in the way of Lehman’s desperate efforts in the past half year to right itself.
You can read the rest here and comment below.
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