The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 24 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Rieder: Lehman Brothers would have survived if Bart McDade became president earlier
“I'd say this to this study and people who were at Lehman Brothers would tell you this, if he became president two years earlier, Lehman would still be around.”
Ellis: Yale removed Lehman Brothers as counterparty years before its collapse
“So sure enough, Lehman was on the list years before the Lehman problem, and years before the Lehman problem, they were taken off the list. And why? Because if you examined it rigorously and carefully, you would realize they're not quite as good at this kind of…”
Friedman: Government inaction on Lehman Brothers triggered the 2008 financial crisis
“The crisis was created when Lehman failed and the government did nothing. They just simply decided, well, we don't have the authority to act, which we know is not true, because you can read laws a million different ways. Once that happened, people lost confide…”
Redleaf: Originate-to-distribute and misaligned incentives did not cause the 2008 crisis
“People and regulators and so forth talk about the originating to distribute as the problem of the financial crisis. I think that that's completely wrong. It's not the case that incentives were misaligned. I mean, all of Lehman's employees Had the bulk of their…”
Housel: Wall Street Critics Would Have Packaged Subprime for $4M Bonuses
“What people missed is that if they had the same incentives as the banker from Lehman Brothers, and their boss said, hey, if you package these subprime bonds, we'll give you a four million dollar bonus. You would have done the same thing too. Of course you woul…”
Aitken: Large regulated banks are far better capitalized than in 2008
“Unlike 2008, every regulated financial institution and all the big ones has more liquidity, has more capital and generally less leverage. If we assume that central counterparties are robust, given all the derivatives that are now centrally cleared, the financi…”
Seides: Inflows and competition eroded hedge fund upside-downside capture post-Lehman
“The other thing that happened was, and it really started post Lehman, hedge funds disappointed. Hedge funds in the past, say equity long, short hedge funds, had a certain kind of Capture of, if the S&P went up 10%, you might expect them to make five or six per…”
Future Fund held 80% of its portfolio in cash when Lehman collapsed
“Fortuitously, and through some good decisions made by the people who were here before me, we were sitting with about 80% in cash when layman's went broke.”
Tremblant Capital Pulled All Funds From Lehman Brothers in Summer 2007
“We took our money away from Lehman Brothers in the summer of oh seven.”
Forman: Lehman executives did not know the risk on their balance sheet
“One of the reasons that the financial crisis occurred in oh eight, oh nine is if you were to look at The TenQ of Lehman Brothers. Last filing before it went bankrupt. There's a big other line item on the balance sheet. You have to read into the footnotes. No o…”
Visser: Markets Mistakenly Treat Complex Crises Like Evergrande as Binary Outcomes
“The reality is there are so many other horses in the race other than it's going to finish first and it's going to finish last, which is the way most market people get to. There are so many outcomes on the distribution that they don't all end up in the same way…”
Golden: Early COVID-19 volatility surpassed the 2008 Lehman Brothers collapse
“During what I think is objectively the most volatile markets in my career, even compared to the Lehman days, you gotta understand Is there anything particularly unusual going on?”
Investors should buy CDS when highly levered entities hit 17 basis points
“Lehman traded at 17 basis points. And just as an overarching theme, anytime a highly levered thing trades anywhere in that zip code, I think he just, I think he puts them on.”
Future Fund Held Approximately 80% in Cash When Lehman Brothers Collapsed
“Fortuitously, and through some good decisions made by the people who were here before me, we were sitting with about 80% in cash when layman's went broke.”
Friedman: Fannie and Freddie represented two-thirds of US GDP during 2008 crisis
“Fannie and Freddie were 10 times bigger than Lehman, yet it didn't have any knockoff impact. It was two-thirds of the GDP of the entire United States, Fannie and Freddie at the time.”
US Search burned $70 million in nine months after its IPO
“Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns took them public. They raised about seventy million dollars and they burned through it in about nine months.”
Rees: Lehman Took 20% Minority Stakes in GLG and D.E. Shaw
“Every time we did one of these minority stakes in hedge funds, we started with GLG and then we did a firm Called Marble Bar and Osprey and D.E. Shaw. We were doing a lot of work in a lot of other areas, and these 20% stakes in hedge funds were paying the bills…”
Chabran: Lehman Brothers Held Single-A Rating Days Before Bankruptcy
“On Friday, September the 13th, 2008, Lehman Brothers were singly raided. On the Monday morning, it had defaulted, and that was the catalyst to, you know, a much wider situation.”
Walthour: Lehman Brothers 1990 Analyst Class Was Exclusively White Outside Diversity Programs
“Outside of those of us that came through some type of diversity program, everyone else was white.”
Avoid matching competitors with different balance sheets and fatal leverage
“And second, don't get so caught up in competing with others who may have very different balance sheets or asset bases relative to yours. That you end up creating leverage or equity situations where you may not be able to survive when markets turn.”
Scaramucci: If Lehman hadn't forced a stock sale, I'd have lost everything
“Every time in my career where I haven't done that, I've gotten blown out, except at that time, through the grace of God, I was forced out of the stock in 2005. I would have held that stock and lost all that money.”
Scaramucci: Dick Fuld gave SkyBridge $10M in balance sheet capital
“Dick Fould gives me ten million dollars of balance sheet capital put in my fund.”
Rieder left Lehman in May 2008 before merging his fund into BlackRock
“Then I went to Lehman, went out of Lehman to run a hedge fund, and unfortunately I did a Mayo eight, wasn't exactly perfect timing. Good timing to leave Lehman, but it wasn't a perfect time to set up a credit hedge fund. And then we had a tough oh eight. And t…”
Solomon: Hedge funds evolved from 1980s Wall Street prop desk spinouts
“If you think about the way the hedge fund business evolved, it evolved from people who were on the prop desks, you know, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, you know, all these different places in the eighties, and they spun out and started their own firms Largely…”