The Last Days of Lehman Brothers, BBC

[mooncliff]

If you have not seen this yet, it is quite good. They show the securitized mortgages in folders... OMG... ridiculous...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLWIPyQXcRE

[lektrode]

Re: The Last Days of Lehman Brothers, BBC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLWIPyQXcRE

"if you talk to 100 people, 102 will tell you they hate bankers - but most wont be able to tell you why....
...
is it because we make a lot of money?.... in general, people resent those they perceive to be on top, thats how the french revolution happened..."

thanks moon, this will be my evenings entertainment - sounds like its a(nother) take on http://margincallmovie.com/

i'm certainly glad that we here on the itulip CAN tell you why, and wouldnt it be great if everybody could?
(course the real problem is those in the 52% that voted for the current reign of... uhhh... terror... and _still_ think they were right...)

why i'm still of the opinion that if even 25% of the US electorate had seen INSIDE JOB, read even 10% of whats on this site?

the french revolution would seem like the good ole days of the 'elite' (aka: the beltway bozos and their string pullers in lwr manhattan)

[Thailandnotes]

Re: The Last Days of Lehman Brothers, BBC

Bloomberg...

Last October (2012) the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed a number of shareholder claims against Lehman’s top management. But it allowed a suit specifically against Fuld that accuses him of fraudulently conveying ownership of a $13.75 million Florida mansion to his wife in the days immediately after Lehman’s collapse—an attempt, the plaintiffs allege, to shield the home from future creditors. His next deposition is scheduled for Oct. 2, when he’ll be asked why he sold his nine-bedroom, 12½-bathroom beachfront mansion to his wife for $10.

Lehman’s $250 million insurance policy has covered many of Fuld’s legal bills and those of other senior managers. But Erin Callan, the former CFO of Lehman, has said that by early last year the fund was fully depleted by settlements and attorneys’ fees. That means Fuld would have to pay his own legal bills and any judgments rendered against him. This isn’t unprecedented. The directors of Enron and Worldcom, the second- and third-largest bankruptcies after Lehman’s, wound up paying millions out of their own pockets.

…

Perhaps as a result, Fuld has been winding down a lifestyle that a friend confides was costing him $5 million a year. He sold his 6,000-square-foot apartment at 640 Park Ave. for $25.9 million. His wife, an avid art collector, stepped down from the MoMA board and enlisted Christie’s to sell 16 rare drawings that netted at least $20 million. According to a 2010 Fortune article by Bloomberg Businessweek contributor William Cohan, Fuld reneged on a $50 million pledge to Middlebury College, where he was once a trustee. He never got his pilot’s license—buying a plane might have been too much of a splurge. Property records show Fuld and his wife still own a large home in Greenwich, Conn., as well as the Sun Valley compound, and, for now, the Florida beachfront mansion. Until the lawsuits are settled, however, he can’t be certain he’ll hold on to them.

One thing that hasn’t diminished is Fuld’s conviction that Henry Paulson is the true villain of the Lehman story, and that the former U.S. Treasury secretary’s refusal to bail out the firm was driven by Paulson’s loathing for a former rival. (Before he joined George W. Bush’s administration, Paulson had been CEO of Goldman Sachs.) To his friends, Fuld insists Lehman, like every Wall Street firm, merely had a liquidity problem but was not bankrupt. Its assets would have regained their value, and the firm its solvency, he says, had it been able to access the Troubled Asset Relief Program funds or been allowed to become a bank holding company, as Morgan Stanley (MS) and Goldman Sachs were in the days after Lehman’s collapse. (Lehman sought this status in July 2008 and was denied.) What really tortures him, friends say, is his belief that it all came down to chance.

…

So Fuld has retreated to a place that is comfortable with long shots and where his name still carries totemic power: the world of lightly regulated over-the-counter stocks. He and his wife are major investors in a Phoenix-based chemical company, GlyEco (GLYE), that recycles ethylene glycol, a chemical compound used in antifreeze and polyester fibers.

“Dick and his wife are shareholders, and his business, Matrix Advisors, has done work for us,” confirms Janet Lorenz, a spokeswoman and the wife of GlyEco President John Lorenz. She wasn’t sure how Fuld had come to be involved but praised his connections. “The man obviously has vast experience in the business community and really a lot of insight in developing companies into large international entities. That’s really what his role has been with us.”

As of now, GlyEco is tiny, with first-quarter sales of $1.2 million and $2.2 million in cash on hand. It’s recently run into trouble. In April its auditors raised “substantial doubts” about its ability to remain a “going concern.” On July 24, GlyEco notified the Securities and Exchange Commission that it had dismissed the auditor and hired a new one.

GlyEco’s lineage shows that its founders’ original ambition was not chemical recycling. It grew out of a holding company for a San Francisco strip club called Boys Toys, which traded under the ticker symbol GRLZ. The owner, Ralph Amato, had sought to build an adult Internet-and-club empire but went bankrupt. This came after a hostile takeover attempt from a rival strip club magnate, whom Amato once called “the Howard Hughes of porn.” In late 2008, GRLZ changed its symbol, eventually settling on the more presentable GLYE. Amato, who didn’t respond to interview requests, is GlyEco’s largest shareholder and remains a consultant for the company, filings show.

Nonetheless, there was Fuld on May 30, in a dark suit and crisp shirt, front and center at the Marcum MicroCap Conference at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan, where GlyEco was among the companies promoting “investment opportunities.” A little more than five years after negotiating Lehman’s mammoth $22 billion joint acquisition of apartment developer Archstone-Smith, Fuld was pushing a penny stock.