Word: lehman
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...manager David Einhorn explain to an audience what had gone wrong with Wall Street. Packaging home loans into securities was a "mediocre idea," he said. Repackaging those securities into yet other securities was a downright bad one. Credit ratings were a joke. Investment banks--he mentioned Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. by name--took too many risks and disclosed too little...
...speech at the time. One could hear similar critiques every day from finance professors, regulators and even some Wall Street executives. Yet there turned out to be a crucial difference: Einhorn was actually doing something about it, betting that the gig would soon be up at Bear and Lehman by selling their shares short...
...that he has now largely won. With Bear Stearns, which the Federal Reserve forced into a fire sale to JPMorgan Chase, he cashed his checks quietly. But in the case of Lehman Bros., Einhorn engaged in a riveting public campaign to goad the firm into confessing its shortcomings. In mid-June, it more or less did. Einhorn, 39--a soft-spoken, baby-faced hedge-fund manager previously best known for winning $659,730 at the 2006 World Series of Poker--had briefly made himself the most important crusader for financial morality on Wall Street. Which may say less about...
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...