Dick Fuld of Lehman Fame is Back!
Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers when it collapsed, returned to the public eye for the first time since 2008. Naturally, he's defending himself, the "culture" he nurtured at his dead firm, whilst shifting the blame for its demise onto the easy money made available by government/Fed policy.
A lesson we might learn here is not only that Wall Street, as we've said many times, is basically a sales organization, but also that objective of those who work on Wall Street, from morning to night, 365 days a year, 24/7, is concocting ways to get paid on transactions. While this is common to all sales organizations, what makes Wall Street unique is its ability to create endless variations on the basic concepts of fees and commissions. That's how they spend the majority of their time: thinking up new and wonderful ways to charge a fee or scalp a commission off the top. All the other so-called "professional" functions that pepper the sales machine - like shiny baubles highlighting a sexy dress on a curvy woman intended to attract and please the eye - are really just enhancements to the fleshy fees and commissions that live and breathe beneath the formal gown of "professional" aka "value-added" services.
So, for the most part, analysts function as sales assistants as they rank the companies they cover. All those math and tech geniuses that bring their quirky brains and PhD's to work every day use all that mental acuity to create programs that will super-charge sales transactions by increasing the volume that can be handled by a firm and the speed with which the transactions can be executed. In personal finance, all the "specialists" - many of which are quite competent in their specialties - provide advice to investment clients in ancillary areas like tax and estate planning in order to keep and ideally increase the assets that the salesmen a/k/a "advisors" supervise and on which those advisors earn fees and commissions.
So thank you Dick Fuld. You've provided this reminder of who you and your multi-millionaire/billionaire friends really are as well as the true nature of the firms you once did and they now do work for.
As for your personal role in the demise of Lehman and the near-collapse of the financial system in 2008, we'll leave that up to God to judge. Lord knows the regulators haven't seen fit to address the issue in any effective manner.
Fuld, the keynote speaker at the Marcum MicroCap Conference in New York, called Lehman one of the greatest investment banks on the street. Employees owned more than 30 percent of the stock, he said, before it imploded in September 2008 and made the largest corporate filing for bankruptcy protection in U.S. history.Of course, Mr. Fuld wasn't likely giving this speech without being paid. So he gets to defend himself and gets paid to do it - the consummate Wall Street guy always figuring out a way to get paid no matter the deal being proferred. We note this without getting into the likely guilt of innocence of this gentleman. It's in their blood, and that's why they made, and still make, and will always make fortunes. The thing is, when they stumble and sometimes fall, there's no particular reason anyone else needs to extend any sympathy. They, like the big banks that recently paid billions in fines for fixing the LIBOR rate for years, have made plenty over time.
A lesson we might learn here is not only that Wall Street, as we've said many times, is basically a sales organization, but also that objective of those who work on Wall Street, from morning to night, 365 days a year, 24/7, is concocting ways to get paid on transactions. While this is common to all sales organizations, what makes Wall Street unique is its ability to create endless variations on the basic concepts of fees and commissions. That's how they spend the majority of their time: thinking up new and wonderful ways to charge a fee or scalp a commission off the top. All the other so-called "professional" functions that pepper the sales machine - like shiny baubles highlighting a sexy dress on a curvy woman intended to attract and please the eye - are really just enhancements to the fleshy fees and commissions that live and breathe beneath the formal gown of "professional" aka "value-added" services.
So, for the most part, analysts function as sales assistants as they rank the companies they cover. All those math and tech geniuses that bring their quirky brains and PhD's to work every day use all that mental acuity to create programs that will super-charge sales transactions by increasing the volume that can be handled by a firm and the speed with which the transactions can be executed. In personal finance, all the "specialists" - many of which are quite competent in their specialties - provide advice to investment clients in ancillary areas like tax and estate planning in order to keep and ideally increase the assets that the salesmen a/k/a "advisors" supervise and on which those advisors earn fees and commissions.
So thank you Dick Fuld. You've provided this reminder of who you and your multi-millionaire/billionaire friends really are as well as the true nature of the firms you once did and they now do work for.
As for your personal role in the demise of Lehman and the near-collapse of the financial system in 2008, we'll leave that up to God to judge. Lord knows the regulators haven't seen fit to address the issue in any effective manner.
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