Also had a villain, to hear Vicky Ward tell it in her gossipy book The Devil’s Casino. His name was Joseph Gregory, and he tricked a chum and respected Lehman leader, Christopher Pettit, she is saying. The episode in 1996 “is still called the Ides of March by senior Lehman middle management ” as it took place on March fifteen, the day Julius Caesar was rubbed out by his former chums in 44 B.C, she is saying. If a 14-year-old office coup sounds unimportant to Lehman’s disintegration in 2008, continue reading. Ward succeeds in illustrating how the covetousness and egotism that lead to the most important insolvency in US history were rooted in a contention among 5 blokes that rose to power at Lehman after it was bought by Amex in 1984. Along the path, she presents an increasingly familiar reappraisal of Richard Fuld Jr, the executive who ruled Lehman for just about fifteen years : “he wasn’t the great general that Gregory wanted him to be, but a person who either was invisible or required to be informed what to do by a more robust subordinate.”.

Of her 5 main characters, Fuld is the well known. The other 4 were the “Ponderosa Boys, ” named after the Western ranchers in the Television series Bonanza.

These 5 men transformed Lehman’s culture, taking their cue from Lewis Glucksman, the bond trader whose feud with Peter Peterson led straight to the North American Express takeover. One at a time, financiers like Stephen Schwarzman fled, leaving Fuld as the most senior member of the just combined firm, Shearson Lehman Bros, aka Slamex, Ward writes. With Pettit available to keep the troops in line and provoke them, Fuld had the forsaken role of fighting with Shearson administrator Peter Cohen about leverage and bonuses, Ward shows. That was Lehman at its best, she disagrees.

Yet Fuld also became isolated from the trading floor, making an aloofness from his foot squaddies that helped trigger Lehman’s downfall in 2008, as previous Lehman trader Lawrence McDonald shows in A Enormous Failure of Common Sense.

When the spinoff from Amex came in 1994, Pettit was the sole remaining threat to Fuld’s position as the head of the new investment bank. Though the troops were loyal to Pettit, a stew of private and pro chaos made him exposed. He grew short-tempered, his bro was expiring from brain cancer and his wedding was collapsing, Ward says.