Dick Fuld is the man who blew up Lehman Brothers and almost took the global economy down with it.
CEO from 1994 until the firm’s demise in 2008, he oversaw the ballooning of its balance sheet, paid himself a king’s ransom in salary and bonuses, ignored every warning signal in sight, then failed to sell the bank in its final weeks because he considered the prices offered too low.
Quite a track record.
At the turn of the century, Fuld visited Lehman’s Tokyo branch. Here’s an eyewitness account of the figure he cut by Russell Jones, Lehman’s Japan economist at the time.
“It was well-known that Fuld did not travel well and that he was uncomfortable away from New York, especially when it came to dealing with foreigners. And from his perspective, things did not get much more foreign than Japan. Surrounded by the coterie of lackeys that followed him everywhere, he flew over on his private jet. But he apparently felt so discombobulated after the flight that he postponed his set-piece presentation to us poor foot-soldiers, preferring instead to recover his strength in his hotel…
The speech was duly rearranged for the next day, but it was poor macho (he talked of ‘ripping the heart out of’ competitors that stood in his way) strident, bombastic, replete with psychobabble and distinctly rose-tinted when it came to the firm. And then during the Q&A, he rounded on comments that even hinted at a view that was at variance with his own. I came away thinking what a narrow, paranoid man he must be…
Later I was one of a group invited to have dinner with him. But I was sufficiently outside the in-crowd that I was put at the far end of the table, barely got a word in and when I did it was ignored. Dick didn’t do macroeconomics. He didn’t do Japan. He didn’t do Limeys and he didn’t do listening. Dick just did Dick. And then he had to leave early because he was tired. God only knows what the locals thought in their audiences with him…”
You can read more such musings in Russell’s wry, self-deprecating memoir of three decades on the financial roller-coaster, which took him from the City in the mid-80s heyday of Thatcherism to post-bubble Japan and then on to the brain-baking heat of Abu Dhabi in the noughties.
The Itinerant Economist is available here.
