Big Bankers and the U.S. Government: A Coalition Circumventing Accountability on Wall Street

It is interesting that the U.S. Department of Justice did not pursue the fraudulent bankers on Wall Street not only during the Bush presidency, but also the following presidency, that of Barak Obama.  Not coincidentally, Goldman Sachs was the single biggest campaign contributor to Obama’s 2008 candidacy for president. It would seem that Wall Street had both political parties in a net by the time of the financial crisis in September, 2008. A sector of the economy being able to control both major parties is bad for not only industrial policy (i.e., favoritism), but also democracy. In short, a government should have enough strength to constrain a business sector, rather than being subject to it. The latter condition implies continued vulnerability should greed again get ahead of itself on Wall Street. By nature, greed, if allowed to go on running on its own steam, accumulates more and more momentum. 

The New York Times reported in 2011, “legal experts point to numerous questionable activities where criminal probes might have borne fruit and possibly still could. Investigators, they argue, could look more deeply at the failure of executives to fully disclose the scope of the risks on their books during the mortgage mania, or the amounts of questionable loans they bundled into securities sold to investors that soured. Prosecutors also could pursue evidence that executives knowingly awarded bonuses to themselves and colleagues based on overly optimistic valuations of mortgage assets — in effect, creating illusory profits that were wiped out by subsequent losses on the same assets. And they might also investigate whether executives cashed in shares based on inside information, or misled regulators and their own boards about looming problems. Merrill Lynch, for example, understated its risky mortgage holdings by hundreds of billions of dollars. And public comments made by Angelo R. Mozilo, the chief executive of Countrywide Financial, praising his mortgage company’s practices were at odds with derisive statements  he made privately in e-mails as he sold shares; the stock subsequently fell sharply as the company’s losses became known. Executives at Lehman Brothers assured investors in the summer of 2008 that the company’s financial position was sound, even though they appeared to have counted as assets certain holdings pledged by Lehman to other companies, according to a person briefed on that case. At Bear Sterns, the first major Wall Street player to collapse, a private litigant says evidence shows that the firm’s executives may have pocketed revenues that should have gone to investors to offset losses when complex mortgage securities soured.”[1]  David Skeel, a law instructor at the University of Pennsylvania, remarked, “It’s consistent with what many people were worried about during the crisis, that different rules would be applied to different players. It goes to the whole perception that Wall Street was taken care of, and Main Street was not.”[2]

Elliot Spitzer, the Attorney General of New York, was preparing to go after some big bankers until he stopped when a lawyer at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) told him to back off because the department would be moving against the bankers. However, it did no such thing; the DOJ would not in fact "move" against the bankers. So it is suspicious; the lie may have been fabricated in Washington, D.C. to protect the bankers. If so, elected representatives including the president who had received sizable campaign contributions from the bankers themselves or their banks would be prime suspects. To suggest that an elected official would not protect a major contributor is like asking water to go up hill.  The subterfuge used by the DOJ at the time was that if the department went after the bankers, the banks themselves, which were too big to fail without taking the financial sector and even the economy with them, would become too unstable.
Incredibly, not only did the bankers not get punished; the banks got bailouts, which the bankers could use to pay themselves bonuses! This included bonuses at Goldman Sachs for selling "crap" (i.e., the subprime-mortgage-based bonds) to even good clients and of course lying about how solid the bonds actually were. 

Bank regulators, who can be "captured" by regulatees not only due to reliance on information from them, but also political pressure from the regulatees' political protectors in Congress and the White House, may have played a role too. According to The New York Times, bank regulators referred 1,837 cases to the Justice Department in 1995. In 2007-2010, an average of only 72 a year was referred for criminal prosecution.  “The Office of Thrift Supervision was in a particularly good position to help guide possible prosecutions.” From the summer of 2007 to the end of 2008, O.T.S.-overseen banks with $355 billion in assets failed. The thrift supervisor, however, did not refer a single case to the Justice Department between 2000 and 2010. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a unit of the Treasury Department, referred only three in that decade.[3]

The relationship between the head of Thrift Supervision and the CEO of Countrywide is particularly revealing.  In March 2007, Countrywide was regulated exclusively by the regulatory agency. That agency was overseen at the time by John M. Reich, a former banker and Senate staff member appointed in 2005 by President George W. Bush. Reich was on all for deregulation. Robert Gnaizda, a former general counsel at the Greenlining Institute, a nonprofit consumer organization in Oakland, Calif., said he had spoken often with Reich about Countrywide’s reckless lending. Gnaizda says that when he suggested to Reich how he could build a case against Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide, Reich “was uninterested. He told me he was a good friend of Mozilo’s.”[4] Reich subsequently refuted that the two were friends. “I met with Mr. Mozilo only a few times," Reich insisted, "always in a business environment, and any insinuation of a personal friendship is simply false.”[5] Even a few business meetings can be sufficient and the same ideology can be sufficient, however, to bend the ear of a regulator. Besides, Reich had reason after the financial crisis to deny any friendship with a man largely discredited due to the mortgage-producing antics at Countrywide. Mozilo’s flush fingers may have stretched as far as the chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Phil Angelides. The New York Times reported in 2011 that he had told two deputies that Mozilo and Countrywide were off limits, though Angelides subsequently denied having made the statement. Instead, he pointed instead to the Republican opposition to hearings on Countrywide in Congress.

I suspect that whether of the deregulation crowd or Democratic, both parties, being of part and parcel of the establishment, had by the financial crisis of 2008 become too close to the vested interests on Wall Street to effectively regulate its banks and bankers, and thus to be in a position to investigate cases of regulatory failure. In other words, when the necessary relationship between financiers and regulators breaks down, accountability does as well. Without the regulators and DOJ being able to constrain excessive greed by holding the people in the financial sector accountable, continued vulnerability to the financial system collapsing as it almost did in September, 2008 can be expected even if it is ignored.  

See Essays on the Financial Crisis: Systemic Greed and Arrogant Stupidity, available at Amazon.

1. Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story, “In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures,” The New York Times, April 14, 2011.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

On the Various Causes of the Financial Crisis of 2008: Have We Learned Anything?

In January, 2011, the Financial Crisis Commission announced its findings. The usual suspects were not much of a surprise; what is particularly notable is how little had changed on Wall Street since the crisis in September of 2008. According to The New York Times, "The report examined the risky mortgage loans that helped build the housing bubble; the packaging of those loans into exotic securities that were sold to investors; and the heedless placement of giant bets on those investments." In spite of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act of 2010 and the panel's report, The New York Times reported that "little on Wall Street has changed." One commissioner, Byron S. Georgiou, a Nevada lawyer, said the financial system was “not really very different” in 2010 from before the crisis. “In fact," he went on, "the concentration of financial assets in the largest commercial and investment banks is really significantly higher today than it was in the run-up to the crisis, as a result of the evisceration of some of the institutions, and the consolidation and merger of others into larger institutions.” Richard Baker, the president of the Managed Funds Association, told The Financial Times, "The most recent financial crisis was caused by institutions that didn't know how to adequately manage risk and were over-leveraged. And I worry that if there is another crisis, it will be because the same institutions have failed to learn from the mistakes of the past." From the testimonies of managers of some of those institutions, one might surmise that the lack of learning in the two years after the crisis was due to a refusal to admit to even a partial role in crisis.  In other words, there appears to have been a crisis of mentality, which, as it contains intractable assumptions and ideological beliefs, as well as stubborn defensiveness, is not easy to dislodge such that legislation past Dodd-Frank could ever be passed.
It is admittedly tempting to go with the status quo than be responsible for reforms. If the reformers are also the former perpetrators, their defensiveness and ineptitude mesh well with the continuance of the status quo even if an entire economy the size of an empire is left vulnerable to a future crisis. To comprehend the inherent danger in the sheer continuance of the status quo, it is helpful to digest the panel's findings. 
The crisis commission found "a bias toward deregulation by government officials, and mismanagement by financiers who failed to perceive the risks." The commission concluded, for example, that "Fannie and Freddie had loosened underwriting standards, bought and guaranteed riskier loans and increased their purchases of mortgage-backed securities because they were fearful of losing more market share to Wall Street competitors." These two organizations were not really market participants, as they were guaranteed by the U.S. Government. That government-backed corporations would act so much like private competitive firms undercuts the assumed civic mission that premises government-underwriting. All this ought to have raised a red flag for everyone--not just the panel which stressed the need for a pro-regulation verdict. 

Lehman was a particularly inept player leading up to the crisis.     Zambio

In terms of the private sector, The New York Times reported that the panel "offered new evidence that officials at Citigroup and Merrill Lynch had portrayed mortgage-related investments to investors as being safer than they really were. It noted — Goldman’s denials to the contrary — that 'Goldman has been criticized — and sued — for selling its subprime mortgage securities to clients while simultaneously betting against those securities.'”  The bank's proprietary net-short position could not be justified by simply market-making as a counter-party to its clients, Blankfein's congressional testimony notwithstanding. 
Relatedly, the panel also pointed to problems in executive compensation at the banks. For example, Stanley O’Neal, chief executive of Merrill Lynch, a bank which failed in the crisis, told the commission about a “dawning awareness” through September 2007 that mortgage securities had been causing disastrous losses at the firm; in spite of his incompetence, he walked away weeks later with a severance package worth $161.5 million. The panel might have gone on to point to the historically relatively huge difference between CEO and lower-level manager compensation and questioned the relative merit, but such a conclusion would go beyond the commission's mission to explain the financial crisis.

With regard to the government, The New York Times reported that the panel "showed that the Fed and the Treasury Department had been plunged into uncertainty and hesitation after Bear Stearns was sold to JPMorgan Chase in March 2008, which contributed to a series of “inconsistent” bailout-related decisions later that year." The Federal Reserve was clearly the steward of lending standards in this country,” said one commissioner, John W. Thompson, a technology executive. “They chose not to act.” Furthermore, Sabeth Siddique, a top Fed regulator, described how his 2005 warnings about the surge in “irresponsible loans” had prompted an “ideological turf war” within the Fed — and resistance from bankers who had accused him of “denying the American dream” to potential home borrowers. That is to say, the Federal Reserve, a corporation wholly owned by the U.S. Government, is too beholden to bankers instead of the common good. So we are back to the issue of a government-guaranteed corporation acting like or on behalf of private companies (and badly at that).
We can conclude generally that governmental, governmental-supported, and private institutions, all acting in their self interests, contributed to a "perfect storm" that knocked down Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Countrywide, AIG, and Freddy and Fannie Mae. Systemically, the commercial paper market--lending between banks--seized up and many of the housing markets in the U.S. took a severe fall such that home borrowers awoke to find their homes under water. The Federal Reserve was caught off-guard, as its chairman, Ben Bernanke, had been claiming that the housing markets could be relied on to stay afloat. Relatedly, AIG insured holders of mortgage-based bonds without bothering to hold enough cash in reserves in case of a major decline in the housing markets all at once. Neither the insurer nor the investment banks that had packaged the subprime mortgages into bonds though to investigate whether Countrywide's mortgage producers had pushed through very risky mortgages before selling them to the banks to package. In short, people who were inept believed nonetheless that they could not be wrong. Dick Fuld, Lehman's CEO, had the firm take on too much debt to buy real estate so that eventually his firm would be as big as Goldman Sachs. That such recklessness would be on the behest of a childish desire to be as big as the other banks testifies as to the need for financial regulation that goes beyond the "comfort zone" of Wall Street's bankers and their political campaign "donations."

See also Essays on the Financial Crisis: Systemic Greed and Arrogant Stupidity, available at Amazon.

Source:

Sam Jones, "Hedge Funds Rebuke Goldman," Financial Times, January 28, 2011, p. 18.

Limiting Bank Size: Crude But Advisable

In February 2012, Tyler Cowen claimed in the New York Times that people across the political spectrum were “talking about splitting up America’s large banks.” At the time, I could discern no such talk, although this does not mean that it was not going on. As the Dodd-Frank financial reform law was being written in 2010, the option of splitting up banks like Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan Chase was quietly but assiduously kept off the front burners. It is difficult to believe that the big banks would have relaxed in their efforts to relegate such threats in early 2012 as if the passage of the legislation in 2010 meant that more astringent options were no longer possible. In his article, Cowen includes some other questionable claims. Reading between the lines, he seems to have been “playing by the rules” in support of the big guys.

Even as Cowen notes that “before its collapse, Lehman had a capitalization of about $60 billion, compared with the $143 billion capitalization of JPMorgan Chase [in early February 2012],” he goes on to characterize breaking up the biggest banks as penalizing size rather than failure. In doing so, he is conflating a regulation with the market mechanism. Whereas the latter is supposed to penalize failure, there is nothing wrong with a regulation limiting size, as it is often correlated with market (and political) power at the expense of competition (and democracy). Moreover, limiting size is not to penalize it. As Cowen himself admits, “banks are usually wealthier, nimbler and smarter than their regulators, at least when it comes to finding loopholes in the regulations or making their moves more opaque.” Limiting the power of bankers by limiting their respective bank’s assets makes perfect sense in protecting the regulators from being unduly pressured from their regulatees.

Furthermore, Cowen conflates bailing out a big bank with bailing out its parts after a spin-off as if a small bank failing were somehow as damaging as a big one going down. He argues that “if the resulting parts of a divided bank cannot turn a profit, the split-up may prompt the very bailout it was trying to avoid.” This is not true, as “the very bailout” to be avoided pertains to that of the big bank rather than any of its parts.

Cowen also assumes that the smaller banks would necessarily be bumping their heads against the maximum size allowed. He argues that “the incentives for the new, smaller banks would be unhealthy. Those banks could make mistakes or take on bad risks without being punished very much in terms of capitalization or revenue, because of their legally capped size. Even if they made big mistakes, these banks would probably be pushing on the frontier of maximum allowed growth.” In other words, he assumes that a limit on size would somehow eclipse any remaining market mechanism. Perhaps he is assuming an overly astringent limit, such as 50 employees. There is a lot of room for limits below a $143 billion capitalization without eviscerating the market mechanism.

In fact, Adam Smith would doubtless maintain that a market with smaller competitors functions better in terms of competition “rewarding” good performance and “penalizing” incompetence. It is as if we are so used to corporate capitalism that we assume that Adam Smith’s version cannot work. I would argue that Smith’s version is actually superior with regard to the market mechanism. Because that mechanism can “freeze up” rather than price-adjust for added risk, we should not rely exclusively even Smith’s competitive market. Given the downsides of the market mechanism itself, limiting the size (and thus power) of the participants is certainly justified. It is not “penalizing size.” I do not believe that Cowen has a firm grasp on either the market mechanism or the nature of government regulation.

Source:

Tyler Cowen, “Break Up the Banks? Here’s an Alternative,” The New York Times, February 11, 2012. 

The Financial Crisis of 2008: On the Role of Negligence Breaching Fiduciary Obligation

Roger Lowenstein laments that “New York Times columnist Joe Nocera lamented that ‘Wall Street bigwigs whose firms took unconscionable risks … aren't even on Justice's radar screen.’ A news story in the Times about a mortgage executive who was convicted of criminal fraud observed, ‘The Justice Dept. has yet to bring charges against an executive who ran a major Wall Street firm leading up to the disaster.’ In the same dispassionate tone, National Public Radio's All Things Considered chimed in, ‘Some of the most publicly reviled figures in the mortgage mess won't face any public accounting.’ New York magazine saw fit to print the estimable opinion of Bernie Madoff, who observed that the dearth of criminal convictions is ‘unbelievable.’ Rolling Stone, which has been beating this drum the longest and with the heaviest hand, reductively asked, ‘Why isn't Wall Street in jail?’”

Lowenstein interprets these sentiments as implying “that the financial crisis was caused by fraud; that people who take big risks should be subject to a criminal investigation; that executives of large financial firms should be criminal suspects after a crash; that public revulsion indicates likely culpability; that it is inconceivable (to Madoff, anyway) that people could lose so much money absent a conspiracy; and that Wall Street bears collective guilt for which a large part of it should be incarcerated.”

Lowenstein argues that “(t)hese assumptions do violence to our system of justice and hinder our understanding of the crisis. The claim that it was ‘caused by financial fraud’ is debatable, but the weight of the evidence is strongly against it. The financial crisis was accompanied by fraud, on the part of mortgage applicants as well as banks. It was caused, more nearly, by a speculative bubble in mortgages, in which bankers, applicants, investors, and regulators were all blind to risk. More broadly, the crash was the result of a tendency in our financial culture, especially after a period of buoyancy, to push leverage and risk-taking to the extreme.”

Lowenstein also ticks off a loose monetary policy (i.e., extremely low interest rates), unaccountability at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, weak financial regulation, and an overconfidence in “risk management” methods in arguing that we should not be reductionist in ascribing the crisis to fraud alone or even primarily.  

Analysis:

Lowenstein is undoubtedly on firm ground in labeling the crisis a “multi-causal” affair. In a general sense, the positive feedback loop wherein everyone benefitted from a rising housing market turned to a negative feedback loop once that market decided to take a hard landing. However, even though he makes a good point that criminal fraud was probably not pervasive on Wall Street, he downplays the litigation that is still possible in going after senior managers at Wall Street banks for negligently breaching their fiduciary obligations to stockholders—the negligence being in the sheer recklessness (which I suspect is a function of individual personalities).

For example, Richard Fuld essentially ignored his risk committee at Lehman Brothers as he added leverage up to forty times value in order to continue buying CDO’s and commercial real estate by the bucketful—his ultimate objective most likely being to bring the bank up to the big league (e.g., with banks such as Goldman Sachs). Would not such recklessness based on egotism constitute fiduciary negligence? It is as though Fuld were under the illusion that the stockholders’ wealth in the bank was his own because of how much of the stock he himself held.

As another example, even Alan Greenberg over at Bear Stearns may have been negligent in not alerting the board as Jim Cayne, the CEO at the time, became “more aloof and full of himself” even as two of the bank’s hedge funds were going down in July 2007 (Greenberg, p. 145). Incredibly, Cayne was playing in a card-game tournament in Nashville for over a week as the executive committee labored daily over whether to liquidate the two hedge funds at the bank that were losing money from their mortgage-related securities and the ensuing redemption calls from nervous investors. Virtually everyone in the senior management of Bear Stearns should have informed the board of Cayne's conduct (i.e., his priorities, which evinced immaturity befitting the man's pot-smoking at the tournaments and even at work). If the directors would have failed to act (e.g., being too cozy with Cayne), the board too should be held by stockholders as woefully negligent.

Furthermore, being on the risk committee, Greenberg may have been negligent in deferring to Warren Spector on the risk issuing from the fixed-income area (e.g., mortgage-backed securities). Claiming that Spector was “imperious” in that area is no excuse for Greenberg failing to exercise diligence given the amount of business the bank was doing in CDOs. Greenberg recounts that “multiple variables contributed to an extremely complex dynamic, yielding consequences that I hadn’t previously encountered” (Greenberg, p. 156). However, he admits to have told Warren a few years earlier to unload CDO’s within 90 days because of the risk involved. Greenberg simply gave up in pushing back from the financial pressure of the large profits being made. Accordingly, he gave up on due diligence on the risk committee and should be held accountable by Stearns stockholders. 

Incidentally, I admire Greenberg for his straightforward recounting of the events leading up to the collapse of his bank, even though I do not buy his account of his role on the risk committee. Perhaps the lesson is that even an ethically solid and competent person is fallable, and may even inadvertantly fall into a negligent pattern of complacency in the midst of momentary profit. The depth of the causes leading to the financial crisis may be evinced, moreover, in that a person such as Greenberg became unintentionally complicit. As Greenberg himself observes, Jamie Diamond at Morgan had urged his bank out of the mortgage-related securities business altogether as far back as 2006 as the housing market was peaking. From this vantage-point, Greenberg himself must surely know in hindsight that he had fellen short.

Whereas Lowenstein claims that one of the causes of the crisis was that risk management methods were followed, I contend that they were relegated or ignored even by the risk averse because the standards stood in the way of large profits. To be sure, Greenberg and others on risk committees relied on the AAA ratings from Moody’s and S & P (though Greenberg had been sufficiently worried to urge quick sales of the bonds). Even so, it should have been prime facie evident that a mortgage-based bond is not a Treasury bond. Furthermore, the rating agencies’ managements should not be held blameless, as they did the bidding of Bear Stearns and Lehman in exchange for lucrative fees;  there was undoubtedly fraud or at least negligence in this conflict of interest.  

Whereas fraud may have been limited largely to salesmen at mortgage brokerage firms and the rating agencies, breaches in fiduciary obligation were, I suspect, running rampant on Wall Street. In other words, money being easy and regulation being light (or non-existent in the case of the CDOs) did not give the banks’ managements a pass on their fiduciary obligation to exercise a duty of care over stockholder’s equity in the banks. Whereas cheap leverage and lack of oversight are context, recklessness with others’ wealth may constitute the principal cause—the lack of concern for risk being part of it.

Generally speaking, boards allowed senior managements—as evinced in the persons of Dick Fuld and Jim Cayne—far too much rope with which to hang themselves. It is astounding to me that people like Fuld and Cayne were able to get anywhere near the authority of a CEO. Their glaring immaturity and incompetence may point to a systemic problem in corporate governance going far beyond what even institutional stockholders realize. It would seem that the boards of Lehman and Stearns were either asleep or in somebody’s pocket (which involves at the very lease a stark conflict of interest). Although holding the managers accountable for their recklessness leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 would be a step in the right direction, stockholder interest warrants systemic reforms to corporate governance itself such that “upper” managements are given much shorter leashes (and stature).  

Sources:

Roger Lowenstein, “Why No Wall St. Bigwig Has Been Prosecuted,” MSNBC.com, May 16, 2011.

Alan Greenberg, The Rise and Fall of Bear Stearns (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2010).

Lehman's Dick Fuld as the Antagonist in the film, "Too Big to Fail"

The reporter-author of Too Big to Fail, Andrew Ross Sorkin, expressed the following fear as his 600-plus-page book was being made into a movie: "I went into the process I think worried – as I imagine most writers would be – that it would be sexed up and hollywoodized in some other way." To be sure, putting the Dick Fuld (CEO of Lehman Brothers) character into any sort of sex scene would have been counterproductive at best.

As it was, the director of the tv-movie based on Sorkin’s book let the drama inherent in the historical events to lead the narrative. The only quibble I may have with the historical veracity has to do with Bart McDade replacing Joe Gregory as President of Lehman. According to Larry McDonald, a former distressed-bonds trader at Lehman, the replacement also relegated Fuld even as he remained as CEO only to quell the markets. Specifically, on June 11, 2008, “Fuld was effectively deposed,” according to McDonald, “by Bart McDade with the support of the executive committee” (McDonald, p. 297). In the movie, however, Fuld was still in charge even in September of that year, with McDade still bowing to him in front of the Koreans.

While it could be that Sorkin and McDonald have different sources of information on whether there was a coup within Lehman, the film’s director and screenwriter could have kept Fuld in charge to maintain the character as the principal antagonist. Even so, McDonald’s description of McDade confronting Fuld in Fuld’s office and the subsequent decision of Gregory in the conference room to take the stunned CFO, Erin Callan, down with him in front of the executive committee would have made excellent scenes in the movie.

The other change I would have made to the screenplay would give the viewers an improved insight into how the sub-prime crisis could have been allowed to get so bad. Specifically, the Fuld character could have had a flashback to Mike Gelband’s warning on June 7, 2005 in defiance of Fuld that Lehman should get out of the housing-related CDO market; the bank was then leveraged twenty-two times its net worth (McDonald, p. 136). Meeting with Gelband and other senior executives on the 31^st floor on that day, Fuld and his allies insinuated that Gelband had some kind of attitude problem that needed to be changed “real fast” (McDonald, p. 138).  As a flashback, this scene would have shown the viewer Fuld’s recklessness in terms of risk (and leverage), and thus how the financial system could have been put in such peril by the “experts”. In fact, in the spring of 2007 Fuld decided to bully and belittle Gelband publically at the bank in order to get him to take on even more risk (McDonald, p. 235). This could have been fused into the “attitude problem” meeting, showing the viewer Fuld’s pathology, which goes beyond a bad temper.

Whether one points to Jim Cayne at Bear Stearns or Dick Fuld at Lehman, the role of pathology in the near-demise of Wall Street could uncover for us how recklessness could have gained such traction. In other words, HBO’s Too Big to Fail could have delved into Fuld’s character beyond having him drop some F-bombs. Speaking on Charlie Rose on the evening of the movie’s premiere, Sorkin marveled that it must be difficult for actors to convey their respective characters in just a few scenes. That is true; however, the director and screenwriter could have brought out Fuld’s pathology (beyond his anger) by a few well-chosen additional scenes. Sometimes what a character says, and to whom, can be more damning than how loud he or she says it. Concerning Fuld, the viewers could have been shaking their heads in utter disbelief rather than simply concluding that the guy is arrogant and has a temper.

See related essay: "Leadership at Lehman: On the Failure of Richard Fuld"

Sources:

Kamelia Angelova, “Andrew Ross Sorkin: I was Worried that ‘Too Big to Fail’ Will Be Sexed Up or Hollywoodized as a Movie,” Business Insider, May 24, 2011.

Lawrence McDonald, Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers (New York: Three River Press, 2009).

An Ethical Meltdown in Japan: On the Toxicity of Tepco's Nuclear Power

Without doubt, Japan’s largest power provider, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), faced the biggest challenge of its 50-year-history in "recovering from the damage done to its nuclear facilities and power systems by a devastating earthquake and tsunami" in 2011.[1] The New York Times reported that "foreign nuclear experts, the Japanese press and an increasingly angry and rattled Japanese public are frustrated by government and power company officials’ failure to communicate clearly and promptly about the nuclear crisis. Pointing to conflicting reports, ambiguous language and a constant refusal to confirm the most basic facts, they suspect officials of withholding or fudging crucial information about the risks posed by the ravaged Daiichi plant."[2]

When a spokesperson for Tepco said early in the morning on March 16th "that a fire had broken out at the Daiichi plant’s No. 4 reactor, a reporter naturally asked how the fire had begun, given that just the day before the company had reported putting out a fire at that same reactor. The executive’s answer: ‘We’ll check. . . . We don’t have information here,’ he explained. After about two hours, the Tepco representative had the information: Turned out the smoke was coming not from reactor No. 4, but from reactor No. 3. If Tepco’s information had been delayed and vague, the reporters’ response was quick and direct. ‘You guys have been saying something different each time!’ one shouted. ‘Don’t tell us things from your impression or thoughts, just tell us what’s going on. Your unclear answers are really confusing!’"[3]

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com.  

Fuld’s Arrogance at Lehman: Systemic Risk

Documents released in May 2012 regarding Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers prove that he was aware of the high risk involved in holding so much real estate (and related security derivatives). This means definitively that “the ‘forces-out-of- our-control’ argument we hear from Wall Street leaders is [self-serving] bunk. It is the ill-advised behavior of one banker after another, day in and day out, that leads to the sort of devastating financial crisis we are only now emerging from.”[1]

The full essay is in Essays on the Financial Crisis, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

1. William Cohan, “Lehman Docs Show Wall Street Arrogance Led to Financial Collapse,” The Huffington Post, May 7, 2012.

Leadership at Lehman: On the Failure of Richard Fuld

The failure of Lehman Brother suggests that too much power may go with formal position while non-positional leadership in organizations is not given enough of a chance to check the excesses of office. Richard Fuld could take advantage of much having to do with his formal position so he would not have to lead. In contrast, a competent subordinate, Mike Gelband, faced a considerable headwind in trying to lead through persuasion without the benefit of a position trumping Fuld’s own.

The full essay is in Essays on the Financial Crisis, which is available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

Related Essays:

 "Fuld's Arrogance at Lehmen: Systemic Risk"

"Lehman's Dick Fuld as the Antagonist in the film, 'Too Big to Fail'"

"Fraud as Fair: Lehman as Beneficiary of Society's Pro-Business Cultural Values"

"Executive Stature: Glimpses of the Man Behind the Curtain"

"Lehman Bros: Insufficient Accountability in Corporate Governance"

Corporate Analogies: Money-Making as War-Games as a Sign of Boredom

What to do when analogies go over the top. As an aspiring writer, I was chastised by more than one writing tutor for mixing analogies. The device can add color to otherwise drab prose to be sure, but too many colors at once can be daunting to even a captivated reader. Consider, for example, the following passage from Larry McDonald about the management at Lehman Brothers:

“In a way, Lehman was run by a junta of platoon officers . . . I think of them as battle-hardened, iron-souled regulars”[1] (p. 89). Richard Fuld, Lehman Brothers’ former CEO, was “our spiritual leader and battlefield commander . . . surrounded by a close coterie of cronies, with almost no contact with anyone else. . . . I suppose that was fine so long as the place was chugging along without civil war or mutiny breaking out, and continuing to coin money, which is after all the prime objective of the merchant bank.”[2] Fuld “worked within a tight palace guard, protected from the lower ranks, communicating only through his handpicked lieutenants.”[3] 

The full essay has been incorporated into On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietzschean Critique of Business Ethics and Management, which is available in print and as an ebook at Amazon. 

1. Lawrence McDonald, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Colapse of Lehman Brothers (2010), p. 89.

2. Ibid., p. 90.

3. Ibid.

Lehman Bros: Insufficient Accountability in Corporate Governance

In an executive meeting at Lehman in the summer of 2008, Skip McGee told Richard Fuld and the other top executives that the market was demanding “that we hold ourselves accountable.”  Essentially, he was pushing for Gregory’s outster.  What strikes me is what he didn’t say–namely, something like, “the stockholders are holding us accountable!”[1]  Had he said this, Fuld might have laughed. Of course, Richard Fuld was a major stockholder, so he might have viewed it as “holding myself accountable to myself.”  Given the inherent ethical conflict of interest in such a statement, I don’t think we can rely on corporate governance as a check on excessive managerial risk-taking when executives hold a substantial share of the stock.  Therefore, in including stock options in executive compensation to align executives' incentives with medium and long-term firm performance, boards should add institutional safeguards or accountability mechanisms to corporate governance. In business-speak, there is a cost incurred that boards may not be aware of in aligning executive compensation (and firm ownership) with future profitability.

The full essay is in Essays on the Financial Crisis.

1. Grace Wong and Aaron Smith, "What Killed Lehman," CNN.com, March 15, 2010.