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Recently, Zero Hedge presented a snapshot analysis of the various securities that made up the triparty repo agreement involving JPM, Lehman and the Fed. We uncovered numerous bankrupt companies' equities that were being pledged as collateral for what ultimately was taxpayer exposure. To our surprise, this discovery is not an exception... (snip) On two occasions last year: on March 16, 2008, and subsequently on September 14, 2008, the Federal Reserve first established what is known as the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF), and subsequently amended it, so that the Fed, in becoming the lender of last resort, would allow any...

Government regulators threatened to remove top Bank of America executives if they backed out of a buyout of failing brokerage giant Merrill Lynch, and offered to provide taxpayer funds to compensate for Merrill's poor performance, according to company records obtained by The Washington Times. The documents - e-mails between bank executives and their outside attorneys as well as board meeting "talking points" prepared for then-Bank of America Chief Executive Ken Lewis - offer new insight into the hardball tactics that produced one of the biggest deals negotiated during the late 2008 global financial crisis, one that is still reverberating on...

In the summer of 2008, two months before Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Richard S. Fuld Jr., the firm's chairman, was continuing his desperate efforts to find a lifeline. They had begun in March, shortly after the demise of Bear Stearns, when Mr. Fuld called the legendary investor Warren E. Buffett seeking a capital infusion, to no avail. Lehman had raised money elsewhere, but that didn't help for long, and its condition again was worsening.Adapted from "Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — And Themselves." The book, being published Tuesday by...

How Harvard Nearly Went Bankrupt After A Rogue Interest Rate Swap Went Very Sour Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/16/2009 17:45 -0500 The school that epitomizes the dangers of groupthink (especially by very intelligent people) and tends to get caught in both the virtues and vices of its own ingeniosity, saw just how expensive hubris can be in 2009. Harvard's endowment dropped 27.3% in 2009 to $27 after hitting roughly $10 billion higher the year before. /snip Yet most notable in the entire report is an interesting story for all those who claim that representing the $200 or so trillion...

WASHINGTON - Mitt Romney had already sent out invitations for his Phoenix fund-raiser, offering supporters the chance to meet him in a Chase Field luxury box over a $300-per-person lunch or a $3,000 VIP reception. But when former rival John McCain called with an offer to be listed as host for the event in his hometown, Romney happily went back to the printer for a new invitation with McCain’s name emblazoned on it. Yesterday, McCain’s gesture helped Romney’s political action committee raise about $80,000. It also consummated an 18-month rapprochement between two competitors who battled for the 2008 GOP presidential...

Just a few short weeks ago the President spoke to Wall Street CEOs on the anniversary of the Lehman Bros. collapse: Unfortunately, there are some in the financial industry who are misreading this moment. Instead of learning the lessons of Lehman and the crisis from which we're still recovering, they're choosing to ignore those lessons. I'm convinced they do so not just at their own peril, but at our nation's. So I want everybody here to hear my words: We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess that was at the heart of this...

The Subprime home mortgage collapse...a Primer. It's ALL about the CRA of 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 - This required banks to offer credit throughout their entire market area for “underserved” populations and small businesses. The CRA gave incentives to help low income borrowers become “home owners”. Liberals call this group “low income borrowers”. Conservatives call them a RISK!The CRA was passed by the Carter administration. In 1995 the Clinton administration authorized subprime loans under the CRA. Democrats added these provisions for the securitization of subprime loans and then ENFORCED the lending to high risk individuals. By 2000,...

Former Secretary of the Navy under Reagan, and member of the 9/11 Commission, John Lehman spoke tonight on the campus of St. Joseph's University. His topic was "The Lessons of 9/11: What we have learned, what have we accomplished, and what remains to be done."

Part of the charm of Wall Street, and what scares most reasonable people away, is that it is as close to a meritocracy as exists on this earth. It's dog eat dog. It's sink or swim. You do a trade and it makes money, then you're a hero (for a moment anyway) and deserve a bonus. You bring in a deal, you get paid. You lasso more clients' assets under your firm's roof, you're a hitter. I once discovered some good news on the stocks I followed before the rest of the Street, and mentioned it to the sales force...

If only. Lawrence McDonald begins his insider’s account of the fall of Lehman Brothers with seven “what if” scenarios, speculating on how different decisions might have saved his former employer. If only Dick Fuld, Lehman’s chief executive, had listened to those who warned of impending losses on the bank’s property portfolio. If only Fuld had not antagonised Hank Paulson, the then Treasury secretary. And so on.* Mr McDonald is far from the only person who believes that the Lehman bankruptcy could have been avoided. Alan Blinder, the former Federal Reserve vice-chairman, has called the decision to let the bank fail...

A BBC production of the last days of Lehman Brothers is a must see. You have to read between the lines a bit, but the production shows how Treasury Secretary Paulson treated Lehman different from the way he handled others that had just as many problems as Lehman. In a nice touch, the BBC hints that Paulson tipped off former Goldman man, and then Merrill CEO, John Thain, of the trouble ahead----which was behind Merrill's sale to Bank of America. The dramatization does a nice job of showing Thain's style in landing an incredible $29 per share for Merrill from...

Equities fell on Friday however all three indices were up for the week. They are looking to open however a bit less than one percent down this morning. According to CNBC, the lower opening reflects a trade dispute between China and the U.S. Stock index futures were pointing to a lower opening for Wall Street as investors worried over a trade dispute between the US and China and reflected on the one-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse.

Regulators today won't define 'systemic risk,' unlike 25 years ago. With Congress back in session and the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers failure upon us, the Obama Administration is resuming its quest for greatly expanded authority to bail out American businesses. Under the Treasury reform blueprint, any financial company, whether a regulated bank or not, could be rescued or seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation if regulators believe it poses a systemic risk. If recent history is any guide, when the feds stage their next intervention, they will not define "systemic risk" and they will refuse to release the...

On the eve of the one-year anniversary of Lehman's liquidation filing , the US President will on Monday warn that there remains much to be done to ensure the problems of the last 12 months do not happen again. Speaking just 10 days before the start of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh – at which world leaders are set to discuss curtailing bankers' bonuses among a raft of potentially restrictive reforms – he will also put the amount of capital banks hold on their balance sheets back at the top of the agenda, acknowledging that the demise of Lehman and...

You can see why markets and governments both like to blame Lehman Brothers for the "Great Contraction". Such wishful thinking shields investors from the nasty reality that deeper forces are at work: it absolves officialdom from its own destructive role in fixing the price of credit too low for 20 years, luring us into debt. As my colleague Jeremy Warner puts it, Lehman no more caused the economic convulsions of the last year than the assassination caused the First World War. There was the little matter of a rising Germany then, and rising China now. Both scrambled the international system,...

"Letting Lehman fail was perhaps the only thing governments have done right during this whole drama,". Rogers argues that the government's actions to rescue Long Term Capital Management ten years ago created systemic risk based on the assumption that the government would ride to the rescue. "Had the central bank allowed the failure of Long Term Capital Management to run its course, Lehman, Bear Stearns, et al would still be here,"

A year after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, questions still swirl around its collapse. Lawrence MacDonald, whose book A Colossal Failure of Common Sense came out in July 2009, maintains that the bank was not in substantially worse shape than other major Wall Street banks. He says Lehman was just “put to sleep. They put the pillow over the face of Lehman Brothers and they put her to sleep.” The question is, why?

The game was up. Gathered in a first-floor conference room at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a huddle of senior Lehman Brothers executives realised that their firm was bust. A last-ditch effort to get Barclays to buy the 185-year-old Wall Street bank had failed. The British were not coming. Bankruptcy was the only card left to play.

A breakdown in communications at the highest level between the US and the UK led to the shock collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers in September last year, a Guardian/Observer investigation has revealed. The downfall of Lehman, which triggered the biggest banking crisis since the Great Depression, came after a rescue bid by the high street bank Barclays failed to materialise.

As consensus builds that the recession is over, some are crediting Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s stewardship and all but re-nominating him by acclamation. But others worry that declaring the recession over is a tad premature. “I would be hesitant to declare the recession over while unemployment remains so dire,” said George Selgin, professor of economics at the Terry College of Business at UGA and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Even if the recession were ending, Selgin thinks it would be a mistake to credit the Fed with the recovery. (It’s not a religious...

Executives at Goldman Sachs sold almost $700m worth of stock following the collapse of Lehman Brothers last September, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Most of the sales occurred during the period in which the investment bank enjoyed the support of $10bn from the troubled asset relief programme. The surge in selling among Goldman partners, at a time when the US government had thrown a lifeline to Wall Street, is likely to draw criticism from lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Having survived the crisis, the bank is expected to report strong second-quarter earnings on Tuesday on rebounding trading...

> "What should the Navy look like? It should look like it can build ships," said Lehman, who led the service for six years in the Reagan administration. "They should sound like they know what they are doing and that it can execute the plan. That today, is not the case." >

BACK when he was a major Wall Street deal maker, Mark A. Walsh, the former head of the global real estate group at Lehman Brothers, had a running joke with Carmine Visone, one of his managing directors. Mr. Visone, 10 years older than his boss, would lecture Mr. Walsh about the importance of fundamentals: land values, construction cost and rents. Mark Walsh and Lehman Brothers financed blockbuster property deals in Manhattan, including the purchases of, from left, the Woolworth Building, the Seagram Building and Lever House. As Mr. Visone remembers it, Mr. Walsh would wave his hand dismissively and would...

<p>It turns out we were looking in the wrong place for weapons of mass destruction.</p> <p>They weren't in Iraq.</p> <p>They were in Lehman Brothers' portfolio.</p> <p>The bankrupt investment bank holds as much as 500,000 pounds of uranium yellowcake -- enough to make a nuclear bomb -- it was learned yesterday.</p>

Lehman Bros. has already set a record as the largest company ever to file for bankruptcy. Now, it’s on course to set a record as the most lucrative for lawyers, especially Harvey Miller and his merry band of lawyers at Weil Gotshal. In the largest quarterly fee request ever made by lawyers representing a bankrupt debtor, Weil earlier this week asked Robert Peck, a federal bankruptcy judge in New York, to sign off on a $55.1 million payment for its work representing Lehman. . . . The pace of the work during a bankruptcy is typically most intense during the...

I came across this video about the downfall of Bear Sterns. It may need a little work but he seems to be on the right trail. At the end he mentions micheal moore (grrrrr) will be doing a movie about the downfall of Bear Sterns. http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=3532&mn=33302&pt=msg&mid=6892335

We contended previously that membership in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership does not speak well of a company's mission or strategy, although there are admittedly good performers on the list. This is because a well-managed corporation does not need government mandates to force businesses and individuals to buy its products (e.g. alternative energy sources, compact fluorescent lamps). As an example, if General Electric was up to the job of engineering cost-effective wind turbines and solar panels, it would probably not be able to make them quickly enough to keep up with demand even without tax credits to encourage their purchase....

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Renowned investor George Soros said on Friday the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis. Soros said the turbulence is actually more severe than during the Great Depression, comparing the current situation to the demise of the Soviet Union. He said the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September marked a turning point in the functioning of the market system. "We witnessed the collapse of the financial system," Soros said at a Columbia University dinner. "It was placed on life support, and it's still...

Lehman and his wife expected a relaxing evening at a north Fresno hotel Monday night. Rick Lehman had a meeting Tuesday in Sacramento and didn't want to get snowed in at their home near North Fork.

Former Lehman boss sells mansion to wife for US$100 FALLEN Lehman Brothers chief executive Richard Fuld sold his $US13.3 million mansion to his wife for just $US100 last November, according to Florida real estate records. The 62-year old executive, who could face civil lawsuits after overseeing the storied investment bank's collapse into bankruptcy proceedings last September, transferred ownership of the 3.3 acres seaside home to Kathleen Fuld on November 10, records show. The couple had jointly bought the home for $US13.75 million in March 2004, as first reported by Cityfile.com. Mr Fuld has been blamed for Lehman's collapse on September...

The sudden crash in oil prices might be the smoking gun that shows speculation, rather than supply and demand, drove the huge run-up in oil futures last year. Daniel Fine of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology’s Center for Energy Policy told participants at a forum in Albuquerque Jan. 16 that massive, speculative trading by investment banks like Lehman Brothers, hedge funds and others is what drove oil above $140 per barrel.

In the past, whenever the financial system came close to a breakdown, the authorities rode to the rescue and prevented it from going over the brink. That is what I expected in 2008 but that is not what happened. On Monday September 15, Lehman Brothers, the US investment bank, was allowed to go into bankruptcy without proper preparation. It was a game-changing event with catastrophic consequences. For a start, the price of credit default swaps, a form of insurance against companies defaulting on debt, went through the roof as investors took cover. AIG, the insurance giant, was carrying a large...

Soros: 'Bad Bank' for Troubled Assets Is Bad Idea Billionaire financier George Soros told CNBC he disagrees with plans to create a new government entity to buy up troubled bank loans and believes former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson mis-managed the first rescue attempt of financial institutions. "That (the "bad bank" proposal) will help relieve the situation, but it will not be sufficient to turn it around," Soros said during a live interview at the Davos economic conference in Switzerland. Instead, Soros said he would create a "good bank" and re-capitalize the good assets. He admitted his alternative plan is not...

January 26, 2009 Ex-Lehman chief sold $13m home to wife for $100 (Susan Walsh/AP) Christine Seib in New York Richard Fuld, the disgraced former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, sold his $13.3 million (£9.6 million) Florida mansion to his wife in November for $100, according to real estate records. Mr Fuld, who is widely blamed for the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September last year, bought the house with his wife, Kathleen, in March 2004 for $13.75 million. On November 10, the 62-year-old banker transferred the seaside mansion into Mrs Fuld's name in return for $100. Mr Fuld is expected...

Richard Fuld, the disgraced former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, sold his $13.3 million (£9.6 million) Florida mansion to his wife in November for $100, according to real estate records. Mr Fuld, who is widely blamed for the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September last year, bought the house with his wife, Kathleen, in March 2004 for $13.75 million. On November 10, the 62-year-old banker transferred the seaside mansion into Mrs Fuld's name in return for $100. Mr Fuld is expected to face civil lawsuits from shareholders furious that he allowed Lehman to fall into bankruptcy rather than be sold...

Dick Fuld: Protecting the Assets That Remain! A tipster just alerted us to a bit of stunning Dick Fuld news: The disgraced ex-CEO of Lehman Brothers transferred ownership of his $13.75 million Jupiter Island mansion to his wife, Kathy, on November 10th. Could Fuld be worried about the flurry of lawsuits from incensed shareholders and creditors? Possibly! According to Martin County, Florida property records, the home was previously owned by the couple jointly. Until, that is, Fuld transferred it to his wife for the princely sum of $100 on November 10, less than two months after the firm went...

As much as $75 billion of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. value was destroyed by the unplanned and chaotic form of the firm's bankruptcy filing in September, according to an internal analysis by the company's restructuring advisers. A less-hurried Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing likely would have preserved tens of billions of dollars of value, according to a three-month study by the advisory firm, Alvarez & Marsal. An orderly filing would have enabled Lehman to sell some assets outside of federal bankruptcy-court protection, and would have given it time to try to unwind its derivatives portfolio in a way that might have...

The bosses of Lehman Brothers destroyed as much as $75 billion (£51.3 billion) of the company's value by rushing the stricken investment bank into a surprise bankruptcy filing, an analysis by Lehman's liquidators has found. Bryan Marsal, co-chief executive of Alvarez & Marsal, the company that is restructuring Lehman, described the surprise bankruptcy filing on September 15 as "an unconscionable waste of value" that robbed the bank's unsecured creditors of much of the $200 billion they are owed. Mr Marsal's report estimates that between $50 billion and $75 billion of assets that could have been used to repay creditors were...

Madoff meets Lehman Posted by: Matthew Goldstein on December 19 It’s not a lot of money compared to the estimated $3 billion that a fund managed by The Tremont Group has lost in the Bernard Madoff scandal. But the same Tremont fund also claims it lost $25 million when Lehman Brothers went bust in September. In October, Tremont’s Rye Select Broad Market fund filed a lawsuit alleging that it was owed some $25 million on a derivatives contract that permitted it to borrow money from a Lehman subsidiary. The derivative contract enabled the Rye fund to leverage its investment in...

A Lehman Brothers broker master minded a $4.8 million insider-trading scheme, passing on to pals valuable in formation from his high-powered publicist wife, whom he dubbed his "golden goose," authorities said yesterday. Matthew Devlin, 35, helped make his friends millions through the scheme, which also involved Playboy magazine's Miss August 1994, the feds said. Maria Checa, 38, a petite, Colombia-born beauty, was not charged in the plot, but is named in the joint civil lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Checa - who, according to the skin mag, likes romantic, candlelit dinners and is turned off by "dishonest"...

Fuld weighs comeback with advisory boutique By Francesco Guerrera in New York Published: December 12 2008 23:43 | Last updated: December 12 2008 23:43 Dick Fuld, the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, is planning a comeback and has told friends he might launch a small advisory firm to harness his contacts in US companies once the dust settles on Lehman’s bankruptcy. People close to the situation said Mr Fuld’s plans were neither firm nor immediate because the legal and political fall-out from Lehman had still to play out. In October, Mr Fuld and other Lehman executives received subpoenas relating...

SINCE 9/11, A PALL of pessimism covered the U.S. Polls show that between 60 and 85 percent of Americans have believed that the U.S. is in a recession or would go into one the following year. But from September 2001 through August 2008, those polls were wrong. Nonetheless, the failure of Lehman Brothers, with its ripple effect on money market accounts and confidence in the U.S. banking system, finally made this prognostication a reality. Rather than a prolonged recession, however, or one that is worsening, we’re seeing a temporary “V”-shaped recession caused by a sharp, fear-driven slowdown in the turnover...

Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama was quick to blame the bankruptcy of Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers on Republicans’ “failed philosophy”. Obama’s September 15 comments were repeated throughout the media--yet reporters have not noted Obama’s glaring conflict of interest—the Lehman debt owed to a bank owned by the financier who loaned millions of dollars to Tony Rezko. Jockeying among the other debtors seeking repayment under Chapter 11 bankruptcy rules is BNP Paribas, a large French bank whose largest single private shareholder is Nadhmi Auchi’s General Mediterranean Holdings (GMH). BNP Paribas is owed $250 million by Lehman. Nadhmi Auchi is an...

Pinstripes to prison stripes for Fuld? By mbernhart Created Oct 15 2008 - 4:55pm Richard Fuld, the infamous former CEO of now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers, could be headed to prison, according to Economist.com. If the aftermath of corporate failures like Enron and WorldCom are any indicator, the general public and the U.S. government will want the Wall Street titans partially responsible for the financial meltdown sent straight to the slammer. Public opinion is already mounting around Fuld's perceived guilt. CNN's Anderson Cooper has even launched a segment entitled "Ten Most Wanted Culprits of the Collapse." Fuld came in at an impressive,...

A group of the largest US hedge funds has called on the Bank of England to intervene to free an estimated $65bn (£38bn) in assets frozen in London in the collapse of Lehman Brothers, warning that delays “could be disastrous for UK plc”. The funds, through the Managed Funds Association, said the scale of the problem was so great that it could undermine bank rescue plans as tens of billions of dollars would be kept out of the market. It was also likely to lead to the failure of some fund managers, said Richard Baker, chief executive of the MFA....

Hedge funds and banks that bought insurance against a default in bonds of Lehman Brothers stand to be $365 billion richer. That's because derivatives traders, using an auction Friday, set the price of Lehman's bonds at 8.625 cents on the dollar. The amount of insurance--in the form of credit default swaps--written to protect bond holders is estimated at $400 billion. Buyers of the insurance will collect the full face value of their holdings from the sellers of the insurance. Of course that also means the banks, funds and insurance companies that sold it are out $365 billion, which is the...

October 11, 2008 Lehman Brothers demise triggers huge default Tom Bawden in New York and Suzy Jagger in Washington Lehman Brothers, the bust investment bank, triggered one of the biggest corporate debt defaults in history yesterday as it emerged that the US Federal Reserve is harbouring grave concerns about whether Washington’s $700 billion (£413 billion) bailout fund will avert a financial meltdown. An auction of Lehman’s bonds yesterday determined that the bank’s borrowings were worth only 8.625 cents on the dollar. The valuation leaves the insurers of the debt a bill of about $365 billion. It is not clear whether...

No article yet on Market Watch, just a banner. Bloomberg reporting as well, but can't be linked under FR rules. To translate this into English, the CDS for Lehman fetched 8.625 cents on the dollar at auction.

FULD, RICHARD NEW YORK,NY 10285 LEHMAN BROTHERS/MANAGING DIRECTOR 4/9/07 $10,000 Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte (D) FULD, RICHARD NEW YORK,NY 10019 LEHMAN BROTHERS/CHAIRMAN AND CEO 1/28/08 $2,000 Reed, Jack (D) FULD, RICHARD S GREENWICH,CT 06831 LEHMAN BROTHERS/CHAIRMAN AND CEO 5/29/07 $2,300 Clinton, Hillary (D) FULD, RICHARD S JR GREENWICH,CT 06831 LEHMAN BROTHERS/CHAIRMAN AND CEO 10/19/07 $2,300 Clinton, Hillary (D) FULD, RICHARD S JR GREENWICH,CT 06831 LEHMAN BROTHERS/FIANCE 5/30/07 $2,300 Obama, Barack (D) FULD, RICHARD S JR GREENWICH,CT 06831 8/28/08 $-2,300 Clinton, Hillary (D) FULD, RICHARD S MR JR GREENWICH,CT 06831 10/22/07 $10,000 National Republican Senatorial Cmte (R) FULD, RICHARD S MR...

Richard Fuld, the disgraced head of Lehman Brothers, was punched in the face in the office gym amid the bank's collapse. Mr Fuld, who has been testifying on the financial crisis before the US House Oversight Committee, was attacked on a Sunday shortly after it was announced that the banking giant was bankrupt. Following rumours that the incident had occurred, Vicki Ward, a US journalist, said "two very senior sources - one incredibly senior source" had confirmed it to her. "He went to the gym after ... Lehman was announced as going under," she told CNBC. "He was on a...