Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy protection
The Hindu, September 16,2008
NEW YORK (AP): Lehman Brothers, a 158-year-old investment bank choked by the credit crisis and falling real estate values, filed for protection from creditors in the biggest bankruptcy filing ever and said it was trying to sell off key business units.
Monday's filing was made in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York by Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the bank's holding company. The case had been assigned to Judge James M. Peck.
Lehman fell under the weight of $60 billion in soured real estate holdings, and the credit market's dislocation ultimately forced it to seek court protection. The credit crisis has caused global banks to write down more than $300 billion in asset value since last year, and caused the shotgun sales of Merrill Lynch & Co. and Bear Stearns Cos.
Lehman's bankruptcy filing marks the end of a Wall Street firm that started the U.S. cotton trade before the Civil War and financed the railroads that built a nation.
The company's roots began in 1844 when Henry Lehman immigrated from Rimpar, Germany, to Alabama, where he established a dry goods store that catered to local cotton farmers in Montgomery. Lehman Brothers evolved from merchandising to a commodities broker, and then later into underwriting where the firm helped finance construction of the Pennsylvania Railroad, among others.
Chairman and Chief Executive Richard S. Fuld, who joined Lehman as a college student in 1969 and was the longest serving CEO on Wall Street, now has the dubious task of winding down the company's $639 billion of assets. It has about 25,000 employees worldwide, joining the swell of unemployed bankers and traders hurt by the credit crisis.
Many Lehman employees seen entering its headquarters in midtown Manhattan tucked their chins down to avoid talking to the media and others who had lined up behind metal barriers in front of the building.
Some carried empty shopping, tote bags or gym bags in to the office. Some walked in with ties undone or wore more casual clothes like polo shirts than they may have otherwise.
Lehman's filing is the biggest corporate bankruptcy in history in terms of assets held, Mike Bickford of Jupiter eSources said. The next biggest bankruptcy was Worldcom Inc., with $126 billion in assets, and Enron Corp., with $81 billion. The figures are not adjusted for inflation.
Lehman plans an orderly liquidation of its assets in the coming months, and possibly years.
``It is going to be big, it's going to be complicated, it's going to involve a phenomenal number of professionals and it will be very expensive,'' John Penn of Haynes & Boone LLP said about the case.
Martin Bienenstock, a partner at Dewey & LeBoeuf who was the lead lawyer on the Enron case, said that while Lehman's case was is the largest ever in terms of asset size, it could end up being far less complicated than Enron and get wrapped up within three to four months.
``It's in a race against time because its franchise is really its people,'' Bienenstock said, adding that Lehman's main mission would be to sort out its case before its employees find new jobs and move on.
In Washington, the Securities and Exchange Commission said its examiners will remain at the offices of Lehman Brothers to oversee an ``orderly transfer'' of assets in retail customer accounts to one or more brokerage firms that are insured by the Securities Investor Protection Corp.
The SEC noted in a statement that Lehman's decision to file for bankruptcy protection does not affect the SIPC protection covering the firm's retail securities customers.
The SEC also said it is coordinating with overseas regulators to protect Lehman's customers and to maintain orderly markets.
``We are committed to using our regulatory and supervisory authorities to reduce the potential for dislocations from Lehman's unwinding, and to maintain the smooth functioning of the financial markets,'' SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said in a statement.
In London, the administrators who have taken control of key Lehman Brothers' businesses in the United Kingdom said it could take years to dispose of the company's assets to pay off creditors.
Tony Lomas of PriceWaterHouseCoopers said liquidating those assets will be more complex than disposing of Enron's European assets, which took six years after the U.S. energy company's 2001 bankruptcy.
Lehman's last hope of surviving outside of court protection faded Sunday after British bank Barclays PLC withdrew its bid to buy the investment bank. The troubled investment bank learned at a last-minute meeting on Friday with federal officials that it would not be getting any emergency funding to give it the liquidity it needed, Chief Financial Officer Ian Lowitt said in an affidavit.
Lowitt said the company had hoped to ``restructure operations, reduce overall cost structure, and improve performance.'' There was a plan in place to sell a majority stake in its investment management business, which includes money manager Neuberger Berman, and to spin-off of its troubled real estate assets into a publicly traded company. It says it is exploring the sale of its broker-dealer operations and is in ``advanced discussions'' to sell its investment management unit.
``Management believed that divorcing the real estate assets from the rest of the company would relieve the pressure on the company,'' he said in the affidavit.
Investors didn't buy the plan, sending shares down 75 percent last week. The stock was worth pennies in electronic trading on Monday, an astonishing descent from the $67.73 it was worth one year ago.
``It's a weird case because ordinarily you think of bankruptcy as giving you breathing space _ it's not clear it will here,'' said David Skeel, a bankruptcy law historian at the University of Pennsylvania. ``They've used up a lot of their lives already. They desperately tried to find a solution. They've tumbled into bankruptcy kind of having run out of near-term options. This is a company that is in free-fall.''
The filing had been made so hastily that the company had not yet filed motions by Monday morning that are typically made on the first day, such as asking the court for permission to continue paying employees.
Ohmy News Korea
Economic Armageddon
Financial markets go into meltdown
John Patrick Boland (
JohnBoland)
Published 2008-09-16 05:43 (KST)
Read any newsreel at the moment and if it is talking about the maelstrom currently swirling around the financial markets it might just mention the word "confidence."
Tony Lomas, of UK accountancy firm PriceWaterHouseCoopers (PWC), refers to it as his employers begin the Herculean task of administrating the chaos that is following the spectacular disintegration of Lehman Brothers -- the major US investment bank where 5,000 London employees face the unedifying prospect of no wages in their bank accounts this month.
The collapse of the bank is unprecedented within an industry that has seen its fair share of shocks recently. Lomas claims that it "underlines … the importance of market confidence." Once that starts to wane or, in the case of Lehman Brothers, disappear completely then an apparently sound business proposition disappears faster than you can say the words "credit crunch."
Despite the shockwaves rippling throughout the United States, the United Kingdom and around the rest of the world, President George Bush remains "confident … that financial markets are flexible and resilient."
There's that word again. Confidence. In the interests of clarity, let's define exactly what confidence means -- for it is in danger of becoming a dirty word. There are numerous references but confidence is variously defined as meaning trust in something -- be it a person or a thing. In this case the" thing" is our financial services industries and the corporate world in general.
Arguably, trust started to diminish a long time ago when financial mismanagement started to increase in its scale and impact. You only needed to be reminded of the disastrous collapse of Enron in late 2001 to discover that the upper reaches of the business world need to be treated with much skepticism. Since then a consistent and verifiable tale of woe featuring various corporations could be constructed -- leading up to what has already been referred to as a (very) Black Monday.
However, returning to the confidence theme and, tellingly, a secondary reference refers to confidence in the context of it being related to a swindle or a fraud. In other words, it's all a con.
The financial instruments created within the US subprime market could perhaps be described as no more than that -- the biggest corporate con of all time. Sadly, the fallout and subsequent impact looks likely to resonate far louder for ordinary hardworking citizens as opposed to the individuals who orchestrated it.
There was a quirky little film released in 2003 that bore the name "Confidence." Starring Ed Burns and Rachel Weisz it delivered a tale of cross and double cross, scam and counter-scam. It's tag line -- "It's not about the money. It's about the money." For our big corporate entities it has always been all about the money and an apparently insatiable greed that has clouded any seemingly rational judgment and led the financial world toward the abyss it currently stares at.
Yet, any keen reader of history could point out that all this might have been a long time in coming. The 1980s added huge impetus to the cause of financial deregulation and this should always have flagged up as a worry in an arena where a cynic might claim that greed and self-interest tend to predominate.
The administration of US President Ronald Reagan was matched in its liberalizing tendencies by that of the UK's then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Together, restrictions on financial markets and their associated activities were gradually eroded. It is no coincidence that with current conditions as they are there is a rising number of commentators suggesting the implementation of tighter controls and stricter regulation of business practices.
If the situation was not so serious then recent claims and comments from our politicians and leaders might actually raise a smile. For months now President Bush and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown have been aided and abetted by others such as Henry Paulson of the US Treasury and Alistair Darling (UK Chancellor of the Exchequer) in claiming that everything will be fine.
Each time a seismic shock makes the global economy quiver, comforting words such as "resilience" and "ability to cope" are offered by the men in ultimate charge. Yet, the arrival of another shock (each more serious than the last) are rendering their words increasingly futile.
Where will it all end? The news about Lehman Brothers precipitated a 30 percent fall in the share value of one of the UK's leading banks, Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS). It also heightened fears that AIG, a major player within insurance, might soon be brought to the brink of collapse.
The complexity of the modern financial system appears to cast a pall over any notions of clarity and transparency and is surely partly to blame for the current crisis. Information about the scale of the credit crunch seems to remain hidden away until a major event reveals a little more about the depth of the crisis.
Should we feel sorry for those caught up directly in the demise of Lehman Brothers? It is hard to know -- every major event always seems to involve collateral damage and innocent people get caught up in the mess. Yet, it would be ridiculous to claim that no one on the inside knew what we on the outside now all know -- that Lehman's business activities were built on very uncertain foundations.
Lehman Brothers had been in possession of a large and extensive portfolio of mortgage-based assets. When the market lost its nerve the bank was always going to be in trouble. My business acumen is not great but having all your eggs in one basket should always have seemed a touch risky, especially within an industry that relies on one thing above all -- confidence.
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