Jamie Dimon rejected Tim Geithner's demand to buy Morgan Stanley for $2
John Mack · How John Mack Saved Morgan Stanley & Transformed Wall Street · Joe Lonsdale · Feb 15, 2023 · at 20:34
Former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack recounts emergency government interventions and merger talks during the 2008 financial crisis.
0:00 / 0:22exact quote · 22.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Tim Geithner, who ran the New York Fed, called me and said, look I can't have Morgan Stanley go out of business. I want you to call Jamie Dimon and he will buy your company. No, we're desperate. I called Jamie and he said, John, I don't want your company. He said, I said, well, Tim Tim Geithner says you do. He said, John, if I were to buy your company, I wouldn't pay you two dollars a share.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from John Mack
Mack hung up on Geithner, Bernanke, and Paulson over $2 buyout demand
“I go over and pick up the phone, and he said, I'm on here with Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson. You know, we want you to sell your firm. And I said, well, you know, out of respect for you, I called Jamie Dimon, and he'd only pay me two dollars a share. And Guy A…”
Hedge funds borrowed Morgan Stanley's own repo money to short its stock
“A number of the hedge funds would come in and borrow money from us through, through a repo account. And then they would take that money and use it to short our stock. And it wasn't just us. They did it to Lehman. They did it to us.”
Every Chinese citizen and leader Mack met claims Taiwan belongs to China
“You ask any Chinese leader, Taiwan is part of China. So what's going to, how's, how's that going to play out? I've never met and I've met a lot of Chinese citizens and leaders. Every one of them says the same thing.”
Mack: Trading floor performance is visible purely through facial expressions
“You could tell what was going on just by looking at people's faces. You didn't have to hear any dialogue, and the person who was smiling was writing big tickets, and the person who was down and had their head down and walking around drinking coffee was not doi…”
Japanese partners Mack trained years earlier wrote the check saving Morgan Stanley
“And, you know, they're the ones that wrote the big check that got us out of the bind.”
Mack launched golf clinics for female executives to combat male networking advantages
“One of the things we started doing as I got more and more comfortable in the job, it was clear that on a Friday afternoon at two o'clock, a lot of the men would disappear to go play golf from May to September. And all of, most of the women were still there wor…”