(no subject)
Lehman Bros Online
"The fact that a corporate entity has some of the same qualities as an individual - a name, a personality, a tax burden - can make it hard not to read its demise as that of a superman who survived war and disease . . . and so why not this? The Lehman Web site, which said nothing about the firm’s bankruptcy filing apart from one paragraph in a press release, did little to discourage such an understanding. The site’s “history” section asked readers to draw a straight line from a general store in the antebellum South - “Henry Lehman, an immigrant from Germany, opened his small shop in the city of Montgomery, Ala., in 1844” - to cotton trading; the postwar founding of the Cotton Exchange; the financing of railroads, retailers like Sears, airlines, film studios like Paramount, radio, television and wildcat oil drilling; to the years leading up to the current corporate rubble.
Indeed, long before subprime mortgages became the rage, Lehman seems to have sought out cockamamie schemes. If it sounded risky, weird and American, evidently, Lehman was there. Until it wasn’t. As late as last year, according to its site, Lehman Brothers was ranked the No. 1 “Most Admired Securities Firm.”
Lehman keeled over? I just saw him in the pink of health in ’07!"
- From "Shiny Happy Bankers"
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Times Magazine, September 28
I went to a career fair earlier this week. First one ever. Lehman Brothers had a table. At least, they had paid for one, and were in the program. But their table was empty of marketing materials, and no representatives had come.
"The fact that a corporate entity has some of the same qualities as an individual - a name, a personality, a tax burden - can make it hard not to read its demise as that of a superman who survived war and disease . . . and so why not this? The Lehman Web site, which said nothing about the firm’s bankruptcy filing apart from one paragraph in a press release, did little to discourage such an understanding. The site’s “history” section asked readers to draw a straight line from a general store in the antebellum South - “Henry Lehman, an immigrant from Germany, opened his small shop in the city of Montgomery, Ala., in 1844” - to cotton trading; the postwar founding of the Cotton Exchange; the financing of railroads, retailers like Sears, airlines, film studios like Paramount, radio, television and wildcat oil drilling; to the years leading up to the current corporate rubble.
Indeed, long before subprime mortgages became the rage, Lehman seems to have sought out cockamamie schemes. If it sounded risky, weird and American, evidently, Lehman was there. Until it wasn’t. As late as last year, according to its site, Lehman Brothers was ranked the No. 1 “Most Admired Securities Firm.”
Lehman keeled over? I just saw him in the pink of health in ’07!"
- From "Shiny Happy Bankers"
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Times Magazine, September 28
I went to a career fair earlier this week. First one ever. Lehman Brothers had a table. At least, they had paid for one, and were in the program. But their table was empty of marketing materials, and no representatives had come.