fi-cri fallout

Lehman Brothers Executives Let Loan Exposures Balloon in Order to Save ‘100 Bankers’

The court-appointed examiner’s report on Lehman Brothers is out, and it is massive. We’ve barely gotten into it, and let’s face it, at 2,200 pages, we will probably never finish it. That’s like reading Too Big to Fail times three! That said, it reads almost as well as Too Big to Fail, too. And despite the examiner’s overall conclusion — which was that directors of Lehman did not breach their fiduciary duties in overseeing the firm as it acquired toxic mortgage assets that eventually sank the firm — the report does seem to be packed with some pretty damning details about the financial fudging and general, if not “gross,” negligence within the firm. A quick scan turned up the following vignette, in which fixed-income chief Roger Nagioff discovers the amount of leveraged loan exposures the firm has built up under the guidance of the firm’s head of investment banking and the highest-paid man on Wall Street, and noted lesbian-hater Hugh “Skip” McGee III.

Nagioff learned about the size of Lehman’s leveraged loan exposures from Kirk, then Head of Global Credit Products. Lehman’s leveraged loan business was “so gargantuan — the exposures jumped out at [him].” Nagioff and Kirk believed that this was “banker business, not broker business,” which Lehman did not have the balance sheet to support. Nagioff also thought that the chance of a sudden market downturn was high, and that Lehman was making relatively small profits for taking increasingly large and illiquid risks. Nagioff was concerned because the tail risk of Lehman’s leveraged loan business totaled billions of dollars.

Good question!

So Skip McGee’s kid was right to stand up to his hateful lefty teacher! Skip really did do his best to save people’s jobs! Even if it was only the jobs of 100 bankers. Which were saved at the expense of the world economy.

Lehman Report [Jenner and Block]

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Lehman Brothers Executives Let Loan Exposures Balloon in Order to Save ‘100 Bankers’