Too Big to Fail Page 3

  Two days earlier he had been napping in the back of his Gulfstream, parked at a military airport near New Delhi, when Kathy woke him. Henry M. Paulson, the Treasury secretary, was on the plane’s phone. From his office in Washington, D.C., some seventy-eight hundred miles away, Paulson told him that Bear Stearns, the giant investment bank, would either be sold or go bankrupt by Monday. Lehman was surely going to feel the reverberations. “You’d better get back here,” he told Fuld. Hoping to return as quickly as possible, Fuld asked Paulson if he could help him get clearance from the government to fly his plane over Russia, shaving the flight time by at least five hours. Paulson chuckled. “I can’t even get that for me,” Paulson told him.

  Twenty-six hours later, with stops in Istanbul and Oslo to refuel, Fuld was back home in Greenwich.

  Fuld replayed the events of the past weekend over and over again in his mind: Bear Stearns, the smallest but scrappiest of Wall Street’s Big Five investment houses, had agreed to be sold—for $2 a fucking share! And to no less than Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase. On top of that, the Federal Reserve had agreed to take on up to $30 billion of losses from Bear’s worst assets to make the deal palatable to Dimon. When Fuld first heard the $2 number from his staff in New York, he thought the airplane’s phone had cut out, clipping off part of the sum.

  Suddenly people were talking about a run on the bank as if it were 1929. When Fuld left for India on Thursday, there were rumors that panicky investors were refusing to trade with Bear, but he could never have imagined that its failure would be so swift. In an industry dependent on the trust of investors—investment banks are financed literally overnight by others on the assumption that they will be around the next morning—Bear’s crash raised serious questions about his own business model. And the short-sellers, those who bet that a stock will go down, not up, and then make a profit once the stock is devalued, were pouncing on every sign of weakness, like Visigoths tearing down the walls of ancient Rome. For a brief moment on the flight back, Fuld had thought about buying Bear himself. Should he? Could he? No, the situation was far too surreal.

  JP Morgan’s deal for Bear Stearns was, he recognized, a lifesaver for the banking industry—and himself. Washington, he thought, was smart to have played matchmaker; the market couldn’t have sustained a blow-up of that scale. The trust—the confidence—that enabled all these banks to pass billions of dollars around to one another would have been shattered. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, Fuld also believed, had made a wise decision to open up, for the first time, the Fed’s discount window to firms like his, giving them access to funds at the same cheap rate the government offers to big commercial banks. With this, Wall Street had a fighting chance.

  Fuld knew that Lehman, as the smallest of the remaining Big Four, was clearly next on the firing line. Its stock had dropped 14.6 percent on Friday, at a point when Bear’s stock was still trading at $30 a share. Was this really happening? Back in India, a little over twenty-four hours ago, he had marveled at the glorious extent of Wall Street’s global reach, its colonization of financial markets all over the world. Was all this coming undone?

  As the car made its way into the city, he rolled his thumb over the trackball on his BlackBerry as if it were a string of worry beads. The U.S. markets wouldn’t open for another four and a half hours, but he could already tell it was going to be a bad day. The Nikkei, the main Japanese index, had already fallen 3.7 percent. In Europe rumors were rampant that ING, the giant Dutch bank, would halt trading with Lehman Brothers and the other broker-dealers, the infelicitous name for firms that trade securities on their own accounts or on behalf of their customers—in other words, the transactions that made Wall Street Wall Street.

  Yep, he thought, this is going to be a real shit-show.

  Just as his car merged onto the West Side Highway, heading south toward Midtown Manhattan, Fuld called his longtime friend, Lehman president Joseph Gregory. It was just before 5:30 a.m., and Gregory, who lived in Lloyd Harbor, Long Island, and had long since given up on driving into the city, was about to board his helicopter for his daily commute. He loved the ease of it. His pilot would land at the West Side Heliport, then a driver would shuttle him to Lehman Brothers’ towering offices in Times Square. Door to door in under twenty minutes.

  “Are you seeing this shit?” Fuld asked Gregory, referring to the carnage in the Asian markets.

  While Fuld had been making his way back from India, Gregory had missed his son’s lacrosse game in Roanoke, Virginia, to spend the weekend at the office organizing the battle plan. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve had sent over a half-dozen goons to Lehman’s office to babysit the staff as they reviewed the firm’s positions.

  Fuld was deeply worried, Gregory thought, and not without reason. But they had lived through crises before. They’d survive, he told himself. They always did.

  The previous summer, when housing prices started to plummet and overextended banks cut back sharply on new lending, Fuld had proudly announced: “Do we have some stuff on the books that would be tough to get rid of? Yes. Is it going to kill us? Of course not.” The firm seemed impregnable then. For three years Lehman had made so much money that it was being mentioned in the same breath as Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s great profit machine.

  As Fuld’s Mercedes sped across a desolate Fiftieth Street, sanitation workers were hauling crowd-control barriers over to Fifth Avenue for the St. Patrick’s Day parade later that day. The car pulled into the back entrance of Lehman headquarters, an imposing glass-and-steel structure that may as well have been a personal monument to Fuld. He was, as Gregory often put it, “the franchise.” He had led Lehman through the tragedy and subsequent disruptions of 9/11, when it had had to abandon its offices across the street from the World Trade Center and work out of hotel rooms in the Sheraton, before buying this new tower from Morgan Stanley in 2001. Wrapped in giant LED television screens, the building was a bit gauche for Fuld’s taste, but with New York City’s unstoppable real estate market, it had turned into a hell of an investment, and he liked that.

  The daunting thirty-first executive floor, known around the firm as “Club 31,” was nearly empty as Fuld stepped out of the elevator and walked toward his office.

  After hanging his coat and jacket in the closet next to his private bathroom, he began his series of daily rituals, immediately logging on to his Bloomberg terminal and switching on CNBC. It was just after 6:00 a.m. One of his two assistants, Angela Judd or Shelby Morgan, would typically arrive in the office within the hour.

  When he checked the futures market—where investors make bets on how stocks will perform when the markets open—the numbers hit him in the face: Lehman shares were down 21 percent. Fuld reflexively did the calculations: He had just personally lost $89.5 million on paper, and the market hadn’t even opened.

  On CNBC, Joe Kernen was interviewing Anton Schutz of Burnham Asset Management about the fallout from the Bear Stearns deal and what it meant for Lehman.

  “We’ve been characterizing Lehman Brothers as the front, or ground zero, for what’s happening today,” Kernen said. “What do you expect to see throughout the session?”

  “I expect these investment banks to be weak,” Schutz replied. “The reason is there’s just this tremendous fear of mismarking of assets on balance sheets, and how could JP Morgan have gotten away with paying so little for Bear Stearns, and why did the Fed have to step up with $30 billion to take on some of the bad assets. I think there’s a lot of question marks out here, and we’re in need of a lot of answers.”

  Fuld watched with a stone face, mildly relieved when the conversation veered away from Lehman. Then it veered back. “What do you do if you’re one of the thousands and thousands of Lehman employees watching every tick here today?” asked Kernen. “This is people on pins and needles.”

  Pins and needles? That didn’t begin to describe it.

  At 7:40 a.m. Hank Paulson called to check in. Dow Jones Newswire was reporting that DBS Group Holdings, the largest bank in Southeast Asia, had circulated an internal memo late the previous week ordering its traders to avoid new transactions involving Bear Stearns and Lehman. Paulson was concerned that Lehman might be losing trading partners, which would be the beginning of the end.

  “We’re going to be fine,” Fuld said, reiterating what he had told him over the weekend about the firm’s solid earnings report, which he planned to announce Tuesday morning. “That’ll quiet down all this shit.”

  “Keep me updated,” Paulson said.

  An hour later tumult ruled on every trading floor in the city. Fuld stayed glued to the two Bloomberg screens on his desk as Lehman’s stock opened: down 35 percent. Moody’s reaffired its A1 rating on the investment bank’s senior long-term debt, but the rating agency had also lowered its outlook to stable from positive. On the flight back from India, Fuld had debated with Gregory and Lehman’s chief legal officer, Tom Russo, about whether to preannounce the firm’s earnings today, before the market opened, instead of tomorrow, as originally planned. There was no compelling reason to wait. The earnings were going to be good. Fuld had been so confident that, before leaving for Asia, he recorded an upbeat internal message to employees. But Russo had talked him out of moving up the earnings announcement, fearing that it might look desperate and ratchet up the anxiety.

  As Lehman’s stock continued to plummet, Fuld was second-guessing not only this decision but countless others. He had known for years that Lehman Brothers’ day of reckoning could come—and worse, that it might sneak up on him. Intellectually, he understood the risks associated with cheap credit and borrowing money to increase the wallop of your bet—what is known on the Street as “leverage.” But, like everyone else on Wall Street, he couldn’t pass up the opportunities. The rewards of placing aggressively optimistic bets on the future were just too great. “It’s paving the road with cheap tar,” he loved to tell his colleagues. “When the weather changes, the potholes that were there will be deeper and uglier.” Now here they were, potholes as far as the eye could see, and he had to admit, it was worse than he’d ever expected. But in his heart he thought Lehman would make it. He couldn’t imagine it any other way.

  Gregory took a seat in front of Fuld’s desk, the two men acknowledging each other without uttering a word. Both leaned forward when CNBC ran a crawl along the bottom of the screen asking: “Who Is Next?”

  “Goddamit,” Fuld growled as they listened incredulously to one talking head after another deliver their firm’s eulogy.

  Within an hour, Lehman’s stock had plunged by 48 percent.

  “The shorts! The shorts!” Fuld bellowed. “That’s what’s happening here!”

  Russo, who had canceled his family’s vacation to Brazil, took the seat next to Gregory. A professorial sixty-five-year-old, he was one of Fuld’s few other confidants in the firm besides Gregory. On this morning, however, he was fanning the flames, telling Fuld the latest rumor swirling around the trading floor: A bunch of “hedgies,” Wall Street’s disparaging nickname for hedge fund managers, had systematically taken down Bear Stearns by pulling their brokerage accounts, buying insurance against the bank—an instrument called a credit default swap, or CDS—and then shorting its stock. According to Russo’s sources, a story making the rounds was that the group of short-sellers who had destroyed Bear had then assembled for a breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan on Sunday morning, clinking glasses of mimosas made with $350 bottles of Cristal to celebrate their achievement. Was it true? Who knew?

  The three executives huddled and planned their counterattack, starting with their morning meeting with nerve-wracked senior managers. How could they change the conversation about Lehman that was going on all over Wall Street? Every discussion about Bear, it seemed, turned into one about Lehman. “Lehman may have to follow Bear into the confessional before Good Friday,” Michael McCarty, an options strategist at Meridian Equity Partners in New York, told Bloomberg Television. Richard Bernstein, the respected chief investment strategist for Merrill Lynch, had sent out an alarming note to clients that morning: “Bear Stearns’s demise should probably be viewed as the first of many,” he wrote, tactfully not mentioning Lehman. “Sentiment is just beginning to catch on as to how broad and deep the credit market bubble has been.”

  By midmorning Fuld was getting calls from everybody—clients, trading partners, rival CEOs—all wanting to know what was going on. Some demanded reassurance; others offered it.

  “Are you all right?” asked John Mack, the CEO of Morgan Stanley and an old friend. “What’s going on over there?”

  “I’m all right,” Fuld told him. “But the rumors are flying. I’ve got two banks that won’t take my name”—Wall Street–speak for the stupefying fact that the banks wouldn’t trade with Lehman. The newest rumor was that Deutsche Bank and HSBC had stopped trading with the firm. “But we’re fine. We’ve got lots of liquidity, so it’s not a problem.”

  “Okay, we’ll trade with you all day,” Mack assured him. “I’ll talk to my trader. Let me know if you need anything.”

  Fuld began reaching out to his key deputies for help. He called the London office and spoke to Jeremy Isaacs, who ran the firm’s operation there. When he got off the phone with Fuld, Isaacs told his team, “I don’t think we’re going bust this afternoon, but I can’t be one hundred percent sure about that. A lot of strange things are happening….”

  Despite his recent infatuation with leverage, Fuld believed in liquidity. He always had. You always needed a lot of cash on hand to ride out the storm, he would say. He liked to tell the story about how he once sat at a blackjack table and watched a “whale” of a gambler in Vegas lose $4.5 million, doubling every lost bet in hopes his luck would change. Fuld took notes on a cocktail napkin, recording the lesson he learned: “I don’t care who you are. You don’t have enough capital.”

  You can never have enough.

  It was a lesson he had learned again in 1998 after the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management blew up. In the immediate aftermath, Lehman was thought to be vulnerable because of its exposure to the mammoth fund. But it survived, barely, because the firm had a cushion of extra cash—and also because Fuld had aggressively fought back. That was another takeaway from the Long Term Capital fiasco: You had to kill rumors. Let them live, and they became self-fulfilling prophecies. As he fumed to the Washington Post at the time, “Each and every one of these rumors was proved to be incorrect. If SEC regulators find out who started these stories, I’d like to have fifteen minutes with them first.”

  One of the people on Fuld’s callback list that morning was Susanne Craig, a hard-nosed reporter at the Wall Street Journal who had been covering Lehman for years. Fuld liked Craig and often spoke to her on “background.” But this morning she had called trying to convince him to be interviewed on the record. She pitched it as a way for him to silence the critics, to explain all the advance planning Lehman had done. Fuld, who hated reading about himself, thought it might be a good idea to participate. He regretted the way he handled the media during the Long Term Capital crisis. He wished he’d been more proactive from the start. “I want to do it right this time,” he told her.

  By noon, Fuld and his lieutenants had formulated a plan: They would give interviews to the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and Barron’s. They’d provide a little ticktock and color to Craig, about what was going on inside the firm, in the hopes that her editors would splash the story on the front page. They set up back-to-back sessions with the reporters starting at 3:00 p.m. The talking points were clear: The rumors were bogus. Lehman had ample liquidity, right up there with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. If the firm did need to make a payout, it was good for the money.

  For the interview with Craig, Fuld was joined in a conference call by Gregory, Russo, and Erin Callan, the company’s new chief financial officer. “We learned we need a lot of liquidity and we also know we need to deal with rumors as they arise, not long after,” Fuld told the reporter. He also stressed the fact that, with the Fed window now open, Lehman was on much stronger footing: “People are betting that the Fed can’t stabilize the market, and I don’t think that is a very good bet.”

  “We have liquidity,” Gregory reiterated. “But while we don’t need it right now, having it there alone sends a strong message about liquidity and its availability to everybody in the market.” That remark skirted the catch-22 involved with the Fed’s decision to make cheap loans available to firms like Lehman: Using it would be an admission of weakness, and no bank wanted to risk that. In fact, the Fed’s move was intended more to reassure investors than to shore up banks. (Ironically, one of Lehman’s own executives, Russo, could take partial credit for the strategy, as he had suggested it in a white paper he presented in Davos, Switzerland, at the annual capitalist ball known as the World Economic Forum, just two months earlier. Timothy F. Geithner, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had been in the audience.)

  After wrapping up the interview, Gregory and Callan returned to their offices and worked the phones, calling hedge funds that were rumored to be scaling back their trading with Lehman and doing everything they could to keep them on board.

  The blitz paid off: In the last hour of trading, Lehman’s stock made a U-turn: After falling nearly 50 percent earlier in the day, it closed down at only 19 percent, at $31.75. It was now at a four-and-half-year low, the gains of the boom years erased in a single day. But the executives were pleased with their efforts. Tomorrow they would release their earnings, and maybe that would keep the good momentum going. Callan would be walking investors through the report in a conference call, and she went back to Gregory’s office to rehearse her lines.