Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld has been in seclusion since the company's bankruptcy filing last week, but get out your popcorn and soda: he's set to be in Washington this week to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Fortune's Patricia Sellers reports that "Fuld is supposed to explain what led to Lehman's collapse and explore the impact on financial markets and the U.S. economy."
For those of you who are playing along at home, there are essentially two possibilities for what Mr. Fuld will offer as an explanation:
- "I screwed up. We borrowed too much money to make bad investments that we didn't understand, and when the crap start to hit the fan, I was dumb enough to buy back stock instead of raising cash. Can you believe that? I take full responsibility for this mess and, no, I'm not giving back my money."
- "My company was destroyed by mean nasty short-sellers who spread mean nasty rumors about the company, and then drove down the stock through naked short-selling. If the SEC would have reined in market speculators and manipulators, we would still be alive and I'd still have that cushy leather desk chair."
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Fuld's explanation will be mainly the latter. But take it with a grain of salt: when former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling was hauled before Congress to explain that company's collapse, he said that "It is my belief that Enron's failure was due to a classic run on the bank, a liquidity crisis spurred by a lack of confidence in the company."
But the reality is that Enron and Lehman filed for bankruptcy protection because they didn't have enough assets to cover their liabilities. Period. And it's wrong to blame that on the few short-sellers who were prescient enough to see through optimistic and misleading "forward-looking statements."











Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
9-21-2008 @ 4:09PM
william lindblad said...
This can be summed up easily.
We have one A.H. that is scheduled to speak to a panel of A.H's------------
It should not be too difficult to determine my meaning.
If they need testimony to determine what happened, it reflects directly on their knowledge of current events.
Anyone think that they are not A.H's?
John Q. Public does not need an explanation.
I hate to sound partisan as it is both parties, but the onslaught of greed and stupidity coincides with Democratic control of Congress and every committee that was supposed to oversee banking and finance has a Democrat as Chair.
I always considered Nadar as a bit far out - but on the other hand - he is honest!
Maybe we do need a third party.
9-21-2008 @ 4:19PM
JP said...
Haha, classic, "Can you believe that?"
Indeed, when a company runs a legitimate business, it doesn't go bankrupt. LEH's business model was based on making money on unsellable structured products, so they had no chance to raise cash because no one is going to give money to a salesman with a worthless product. It's like selling shoes with holes in them.
Shorts tell you something is fundamentally wrong, and they're willing to risk unlimited losses to tell you so. Naked shorting is illegal, and likely did occur. Although, even if there was not a single naked short transaction, the final outcome would be parallel, just dragged out over time.
9-22-2008 @ 5:52PM
cara ellison said...
After studying Enron for the past seven years, I came to the conclusion that Jeff Skilling was absolutely correct when he said Enron failed due to a run on the bank. With Bear Stearns, Lehman, IndyMac, and others collapsing in an almost photographic description of the same way Enron did, my findings have only solidified.
Lehman wasn't corrupt. Nor was Enron. It's just going to take a long time for people to recognize that these were good companies.