Another One Bites the Dust

Done; 243-page Greed and Glory on Wall Street: the Fall of the House of Lehman is done. (Not available in stores, but can be borrowed from the library. It was better than the last one I read on E.F. Hutton. Predating Hutton's demise by about 3.5 years, the story of Lehman was very interesting. Some colorful personalities (such as Lewis Glucksman and Peter G. Peterson) and although it didn't go into the history of the firm as much as my reads into Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley did, it did exude the feeling of an old-fashioned partnership dependent on relationship-banking making its transformation into the transaction-oriented world of today.

In the way of an update, one of the main partners, Richard (Dick) Fuld remained with the firm through its time under the wing of Shearson/American Express (called Shearson Lehman Brothers, later Shearson Lehman Hutton after they bought them up in 1987). Fuld started in 1968 at Lehman (his first job) and at the tender age of 38 (in 1984) when it was bought out netted $7.6 million (on top of a salary and bonus of $1-$2 million a year). Lehman Brothers (LEH:NYSE) went public in 1994 (I'm not sure how this came about, so I have some digging to do) and Fuld is now the company's Chairman. The firm has done well, rising from about a $6 (split-adjusted) IPO price up to about $91 now. Fuld made $15.41 million last year (yes, double his buyout money in 1993). On top of that he owns over 1.2 million shares of the firm (valued at over $100 million) and exercised options and sold shares to allow him to rake in about $140.6 million since November 2003 (I netted off the cost of options exercised in that period but didn't deduct the adjusted cost base of the shares sold as that was not available--however, some of the shares came from $0 strike price options or were sold at prices far in excess of near-dated options exercises. He made a lot of money.) So, I guess if you stay with a firm for 37 years or so you can get rich.

My next book is Greed: Investment Fraud in Canada and Around the Globe (no link from Indigo or Amazon, odd). I've already read Rogue Trader, Free Rider: How a Bay Street Whiz Kid Stole and Spent $20 Million (read that 600-pager in the flight to Seoul one time) and one on Bre-X whose title eludes me. A short skim of it makes me wonder if this one is as weighty as the others...hope it doesn't disappoint.

Got to get to work, later.