Word: firm
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...Brewery, as Anheuser-Busch is known around town, is not technically the biggest firm left standing; that honor goes to industrial conglomerate Emerson Electric. But it is certainly the most famous, an iconic American brand backed by one of the largest advertising budgets on earth. Nearly half of all American beer is brewed by A-B. Every time a radio ad for Bud or Bud Light ends with the words "St. Louis, Missouri," it's a shot in the arm for the hometown, which is why more than 45,000 people, including the mayor of St. Louis and the governor...
Last summer the bet against Allied finally started to pay off (the company's stock is down 50% over the past year), and Einhorn began shorting Bear and Lehman--the smallest and least diversified of Wall Street's big firms. These companies once made all their money off commissions and fees, but the bulk of their profits in recent years has come from making bets. At Lehman Bros., trading and investing on the firm's own account contributed about 60% of its $6 billion in pretax profits last year. Key to these profits is leverage, a.k.a. debt. But with high...
After Lehman weathered the Bear scare, Einhorn began to speak out. He said in April that the firm needed to cut its borrowing dramatically. Then in early May he began pointing out apparent gaps in its first-quarter earnings report. His comments, he later told me, amounted to saying, "Gee, there's a naked emperor...
...weeks, Lehman battled Einhorn's assertions. Some of the Wall Street analysts who follow the firm dismissed him as a half-informed dabbler. Then Lehman disclosed that it had lost $2.8 billion in the second quarter. It raised $6 billion by selling new shares, addressing Einhorn's concerns about overindebtedness. It removed its chief financial officer and chief operating officer. Chief executive Richard Fuld got on the company public-address system and declared, "Einhorn didn't lose us $2.8 billion. We lost...
...possible that some of this would have happened without Einhorn's badgering. But nobody else--not the SEC, not the Fed, not the analysts, not investors, not Lehman's board--was putting public pressure on the firm's executives to come clean. Some may have feared inciting a panic like the one at Bear Stearns. I asked Einhorn whether he worried about that. No, he said. "If you're running a financial firm, you need to run it in such a way that you can survive a civil discussion...