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Dick Fuld has said that several times publicly, there are interviews with the FCIC where he said that there was a conspiracy against LEH, and almost every part

Dick Fuld has said that several times publicly, there are interviews with the FCIC where he said that there was a conspiracy against LEH, and almost every part of the meetings at the NY Fed are public knowledge...you have no behind the scenes knowledge (you sound like every person: I met X who did Y terrible thing, he isn't actually a bad guy, I am going to ignore all the public information about X and prioritise my super special "insider" knowledge). I will ask you a different question: if LEH was so strong, why didn't the Koreans invest? Why didn't BARC invest before BK? The issue, again and again and as explained at massive length in several books, they had very shaky funding, they had a lot of stuff that no-one knew how to value, they insisted to everyone that this stuff was very very valuable...it was not. If the real estate was so valuable, why couldn't they sell it? Every single person who I have ever met in the same position (I have met many) is in denial...that is why they are in that position. Fuld made numerous mistakes that can be summarised as: he thought he had pocket aces, he had 72o. Asking Dick Fuld for opinions on Dick Fuld is not smart.

numair 6y ago
I am not going to go too far into this but, I was in meetings with Dick and senior executives from the other banks. The “lol sorry bro” attitude wasn’t just Dick’s way of telling the story.
- hogFeast 6y ago
  ...I am not sure that I disputed that. What I said was: the reason why LEH didn't get bailed out was because the stock was worthless, and mgmt mismanaged that from day one (even towards the end, LEH was trying to sell its real estate at book...this isn't hard). And then Fuld went around telling everyone he should have got bailed out (btw, if you went into a meeting with other banks and started telling them they should give you money for nothing...do you think that wouuld have went down well?).
whimsicalism 6y ago
> I met X who did Y terrible thing, he isn't actually a bad guy, I am going to ignore all the public information about X and prioritise my super special "insider" knowledge And it's such a trope. I swear, it feels like the quality of discussion on HN has gotten measurably more low-brow in the last few days.

numair 6y ago

I am not going to go too far into this but, I was in meetings with Dick and senior executives from the other banks. The “lol sorry bro” attitude wasn’t just Dick’s way of telling the story.

hogFeast 6y ago
...I am not sure that I disputed that. What I said was: the reason why LEH didn't get bailed out was because the stock was worthless, and mgmt mismanaged that from day one (even towards the end, LEH was trying to sell its real estate at book...this isn't hard). And then Fuld went around telling everyone he should have got bailed out (btw, if you went into a meeting with other banks and started telling them they should give you money for nothing...do you think that wouuld have went down well?).

whimsicalism 6y ago

> I met X who did Y terrible thing, he isn't actually a bad guy, I am going to ignore all the public information about X and prioritise my super special "insider" knowledge And it's such a trope. I swear, it feels like the quality of discussion on HN has gotten measurably more low-brow in the last few days.