Lehman Bros

ntbcw lewis lehrman RR iran contra)

refers to family (john) decendent penn, cousin princess grace

merged with amex, spun off

subprime

trust fund baby gop donor reagan plum

AMBASSADOR JOHN L. LOEB JR., a scion of two Wall Street dynasties—Loeb, Rhoades and Lehman Brothers (part of the lost world of “Our Crowd”)—shares his remarkable family history and personal life story as a financier, ambassador, art collector, and philanthropist. denmark

Loeb’s life of public service includes a stint in the US Air Force, chairmanship of the New York State Council on the Environment under then-governor Nelson Rockefeller, and US Ambassador to Denmark. Appointed to that post by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, Loeb began building what is today the largest privately held collection of Danish fine art outside of Danish museums. When he completed his tour, Queen Margarethe of Denmark presented him with the Grand Cross of the Order of Dannebrog, her nation’s highest civilian honor.

10th anniv; intern

https://www.alternet.org/watching-lehman-brothers-collapse-inside-2008-recruit-recounts-banks-final-days

got start by swooping in to buy up cheap cotton, so implicated in slavery?

cf kpfa 8/9/18

baptist cornell

https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/0465049664

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehman_Brothers

...

On September 17, 2008 Swiss Re estimated its overall net exposure to Lehman Brothers as approximately CHF 50 million.^[52]

Investor confidence continued to erode as Lehman's stock lost roughly half its value and pushed the S&P 500 down 3.4% on September 9. The Dow Jones lost 300 points the same day on investors' concerns about the security of the bank.^[53] The U.S. government did not announce any plans to assist with any possible financial crisis that emerged at Lehman.^[54]

The next day, Lehman announced a loss of $3.9 billion and its intent to sell off a majority stake in its investment-management business, which includes Neuberger Berman.^[55][56] The stock slid seven percent that day.^[56][57] Lehman, after earlier rejecting questions on the sale of the company, was reportedly searching for a buyer as its stock price dropped another 40 percent on September 11, 2008.^[57]

Just before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, executives at Neuberger Berman sent e-mail memos suggesting, among other things, that the Lehman Brothers' top people forgo multi-million dollar bonuses to "send a strong message to both employees and investors that management is not shirking accountability for recent performance."^[58]

Lehman Brothers Investment Management Director George Herbert Walker IV dismissed the proposal, going so far as to actually apologize to other members of the Lehman Brothers executive committee for the idea of bonus reduction having been suggested. He wrote, "Sorry team. I am not sure what's in the water at Neuberger Berman. I'm embarrassed and I apologize."^[58]

Short-selling allegations:{:(style="margin-right:0px;color:#555555;;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

During hearings on the bankruptcy filing by Lehman Brothers and bailout of AIG before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,^[59] former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld said a host of factors including a crisis of confidence and naked short-selling attacks followed by false rumors contributed to both the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. House committee Chairman Henry Waxman said the committee received thousands of pages of internal documents from Lehman and these documents portray a company in which there was “no accountability for failure".^[60][61][62]

An article by journalist Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone contended that naked short selling contributed to the demise of both Lehman and Bear Stearns.^[63] A study by finance researchers at the University of Oklahoma Price College of Business studied trading in financial stocks, including Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, and found "no evidence that stock price declines were caused by naked short selling".^[64]

Aftermath of repeal

Main article: Glass–Steagall: Aftermath of repeal

After the financial crisis of 2007–2008, some commentators argued that the repeal of Sections 20 and 32 had played an important role in leading to the housing bubble and financial crisis. Economics Nobel prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz, for instance, argued that "[w]hen repeal of Glass-Steagall brought investment and commercial banks together, the investment-bank culture came out on top", and banks which had previously been managed conservatively turned to riskier investments to increase their returns.^[11] Another laureate, Paul Krugman, contended that the repealing of the act "was indeed a mistake"; however, it was not the cause of the financial crisis.^[24]

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/opinion/democrats-republicans-and-wall-street-tycoons.html

:{Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had an argument about financial regulation during:(style="background-color:#ffffff;;color:#333333;"):}::{ :(style="background-color:#ffffff;;color:#333333;"):}:[Tuesday’s debate — but it wasn’t about whether to crack down on banks. Instead, it was about whose plan was tougher. The contrast with Republicans like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, who have pledged to reverse even the moderate financial reforms enacted in 2010, couldn’t be stronger.

For what it’s worth, Mrs. Clinton had the better case. Mr. Sanders has been focused on restoring Glass-Steagall, the rule that separated deposit-taking banks from riskier wheeling and dealing. And repealing Glass-Steagall was indeed a mistake. But it’s not what caused the financial crisis, which arose instead from “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers, which don’t take deposits but can nonetheless wreak havoc when they fail. Mrs. Clinton has laid out a plan to rein in shadow banks; so far, Mr. Sanders hasn’t.

]

see bankster:

matt t RS 2/11

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that formerLehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuldconveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

Invasion of the Home Snatchers

Instead, federal regulators and prosecutors have let the banks and finance companies that tried to burn the world economy to the ground get off with carefully orchestrated settlements — whitewash jobs that involve thefirms paying pathetically small fines without even being required to admit wrongdoing. To add insult to injury, the people who actually committed the crimes almost never pay the fines themselves; banks caught defrauding their shareholders often use shareholder money to foot the tab of justice."If the allegations in these settlements are true," says Jed Rakoff, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, "it's management buying its way off cheap, from the pockets of their victims."

Taibblog: Commentary on politics and the economy by Matt Taibbi

To understand the significance of this, one has to think carefully about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth — people who simply get their companies to pay their fines for them. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."

But that hasn't happened. Because the entire system set up to monitor and regulate Wall Street is fucked up.

Just ask the people who tried to do the right thing.

Wall Street's Naked Swindle

Here's how regulation of Wall Street is supposed to work. To begin with, there's a semigigantic list of public and quasi-public agencies ostensibly keeping their eyes on the economy, a dense alphabet soup of banking, insurance, S&L, securities and commodities regulators like the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), as well as supposedly "self-regulating organizations" like the New York Stock Exchange.All of these outfits, by law, can at least begin the process of catching and investigating financial criminals, though none of them has prosecutorial power.

The major federal agency on the Wall Street beat is the Securities and Exchange Commission.The SEC watches for violations like insider trading, and also deals with so-called "disclosure violations" — i.e., making sure that all the financial information that publicly traded companies are required to make public actually jibes with reality.But the SEC doesn't have prosecutorial power either, so in practice, when it looks like someone needs to go to jail, they refer the case to the Justice Department. And since the vast majority of crimes in the financial services industry take place in Lower Manhattan, cases referred by the SEC often end up in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. Thus, the two top cops on Wall Street are generally considered to be that U.S. attorney — a job that has been held by thunderous prosecutorial personae like Robert Morgenthau and Rudy Giuliani — and the SEC's director of enforcement.

The relationship between the SEC and the DOJ is necessarily close, even symbiotic. Since financial crime-fighting requires a high degree of financial expertise — and since the typical drug-and-terrorism-obsessed FBI agent can't balance his own checkbook, let alone tell a synthetic CDO from a credit default swap — the Justice Department ends up leaning heavily on the SEC's army of 1,100 number-crunching investigators to make their cases. In theory, it's a well-oiled, tag-team affair: Billionaire Wall Street Asshole commits fraud, the NYSE catches on and tips off the SEC, the SEC works the case and delivers it to Justice, and Justice perp-walks the Asshole out of Nobu, into a Crown Victoria and off to 36 months of push-ups, license-plate making and Salisbury steak.

That's the way it's supposed to work. But a veritable mountain of evidence indicates that when it comes to Wall Street, the justice system not only sucks at punishing financial criminals, it has actually evolved into a highly effective mechanism for protecting financial criminals. This institutional reality has absolutely nothing to do with politics or ideology — it takes place no matter who's in office or which party's in power. To understand how the machinery functions, you have to start back at least a decade ago, as case after case of financial malfeasance was pursued too slowly or not at all, fumbled by a government bureaucracy that too often is on a first-name basis with its targets. Indeed, the shocking pattern of nonenforcement with regard to Wall Street is so deeply ingrained in Washington that it raises a profound and difficult question about the very nature of our society: whether we have created a class of people whose misdeeds are no longer perceived as crimes, almost no matter what those misdeeds are. The SEC and the Justice Department have evolved into a bizarre species of social surgeon serving this nonjailable class, expert not at administering punishment and justice, but at finding and removing criminal responsibility from the bodies of the accused.

The systematic lack of regulation has left even the country's top regulators frustrated. Lynn Turner, a former chief accountant for the SEC, laughs darkly at the idea that the criminal justice system is broken when it comes to Wall Street. "I think you've got a wrong assumption — that we even have a law-enforcement agency when it comes to Wall Street," he says.

In the hierarchy of the SEC, the chief accountant plays a major role in working to pursue misleading and phony financial disclosures. Turner held the post a decade ago, when one of the most significant cases was swallowed up by the SEC bureaucracy. In the late 1990s, the agency had an open-and-shut case against the Rite Aid drugstore chain, which was using diabolical accounting tricks to cook their books. But instead of moving swiftly to crack down on such scams, the SEC shoved the case into the "deal with it later" file. "The Philadelphia office literally did nothing with the case for a year," Turner recalls. "Very much like the New York office with Madoff." The Rite Aid case dragged on for years — and by the time it was finished, similar accounting fiascoes at Enron and WorldCom had exploded into a full-blown financial crisis. The same was true for another SEC case that presaged the Enron disaster. The agency knew that appliance-maker Sunbeam was using the same kind of accounting scams to systematically hide losses from its investors. But in the end, the SEC's punishment for Sunbeam's CEO, Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap — widely regarded as one of the biggest assholes in the history of American finance — was a fine of $500,000. Dunlap's net worth at the time was an estimated $100 million. The SEC also barred Dunlap from ever running a public company again — forcing him to retire with a mere $99.5 million. Dunlap passed the time collecting royalties from his self-congratulatory memoir. Its title: Mean Business.

The pattern of inaction toward shady deals on Wall Street grew worse and worse after Turner left, with one slam-dunk case after another either languishing for years or disappearing altogether. Perhaps the most notorious example involved Gary Aguirre, an SEC investigator who was literally fired after he questioned the agency's failure to pursue an insider-trading case against John Mack, now the chairman of Morgan Stanley and one of America's most powerful bankers.

Aguirre joined the SEC in September 2004. Two days into his career as a financial investigator, he was asked to look into an insider-trading complaint against a hedge-fund megastar named Art Samberg. One day, with no advance research or discussion, Samberg had suddenly started buying up huge quantities of shares in a firm called Heller Financial. "It was as if Art Samberg woke up one morning and a voice from the heavens told him to start buying Heller," Aguirre recalls. "And he wasn't just buying shares — there were some days when he was trying to buy three times as many shares as were being traded that day." A few weeks later, Heller was bought by General Electric — and Samberg pocketed $18 million.

After some digging, Aguirre found himself focusing on one suspect as the likely source who had tipped Samberg off: John Mack, a close friend of Samberg's who had just stepped down as president of Morgan Stanley. At the time, Mack had been on Samberg's case to cut him into a deal involving a spinoff of the tech company Lucent — an investment that stood to make Mack a lot of money. "Mack is busting my chops" to give him a piece of the action, Samberg told an employee in an e-mail.

A week later, Mack flew to Switzerland to interview for a top job at Credit Suisse First Boston. Among the investment bank's clients, as it happened, was a firm called Heller Financial. We don't know for sure what Mack learned on his Swiss trip; years later, Mack would claim that he had thrown away his notes about the meetings. But we do know that as soon as Mack returned from the trip, on a Friday, he called up his buddy Samberg. The very next morning, Mack was cut into the Lucent deal — a favor that netted him more than $10 million. And as soon as the market reopened after the weekend, Samberg started buying every Heller share in sight, right before it was snapped up by GE — a suspiciously timed move that earned him the equivalent of Derek Jeter's annual salary for just a few minutes of work.

The deal looked like a classic case of insider trading. But in the summer of 2005, when Aguirre told his boss he planned to interview Mack, things started getting weird. His boss told him the case wasn't likely to fly, explaining that Mack had "powerful political connections." (The investment banker had been a fundraising "Ranger" for George Bush in 2004, and would go on to be a key backer of Hillary Clinton in 2008.)

Aguirre also started to feel pressure from Morgan Stanley, which was in the process of trying to rehire Mack as CEO. At first, Aguirre was contacted by the bank's regulatory liaison, Eric Dinallo, a former top aide to Eliot Spitzer. But it didn't take long for Morgan Stanley to work its way up the SEC chain of command. Within three days, another of the firm's lawyers, Mary Jo White, was on the phone with the SEC's director of enforcement. In a shocking move that was later singled out by Senate investigators, the director actually appeared to reassure White, dismissing the case against Mack as "smoke" rather than "fire." White, incidentally, was herself the former U.S. attorney of the Southern District of New York — one of the top cops on Wall Street.

Pause for a minute to take this in. Aguirre, an SEC foot soldier, is trying to interview a major Wall Street executive — not handcuff the guy or impound his yacht, mind you, just talk to him. In the course of doing so, he finds out that his target's firm is being represented not only by Eliot Spitzer's former top aide, but by the former U.S. attorney overseeing Wall Street, who is going four levels over his head to speak directly to the chief of the SEC's enforcement division — not Aguirre's boss, but his boss's boss's boss's boss. Mack himself, meanwhile, was being represented by Gary Lynch, a former SEC director of enforcement.

Aguirre didn't stand a chance.A month after he complained to his supervisors that he was being blocked from interviewing Mack, he was summarily fired, without notice. The case against Mack was immediately dropped: all depositions canceled, no further subpoenas issued. "It all happened so fast, I needed a seat belt," recalls Aguirre, who had just received a stellar performance review from his bosses. The SEC eventually paid Aguirre a settlement of $755,000 for wrongful dismissal.

Rather than going after Mack, the SEC started looking for someone else to blame for tipping off Samberg. (It was, Aguirre quips, "O.J.'s search for the real killers.") It wasn't until a year later that the agency finally got around to interviewing Mack, who denied any wrongdoing. The four-hour deposition took place on August 1st, 2006 — just days after the five-year statute of limitations on insider trading had expired in the case.

"At best, the picture shows extraordinarily lax enforcement by the SEC," Senate investigators would later conclude. "At worse, the picture is colored with overtones of a possible cover-up."

Episodes like this help explain why so many Wall Street executives felt emboldened to push the regulatory envelope during the mid-2000s. Over and over, even the most obvious cases of fraud and insider dealing got gummed up in the works, and high-ranking executives were almost never prosecuted for their crimes. In 2003, Freddie Mac coughed up $125 million after it was caught misreporting its earnings by $5 billion; nobody went to jail. In 2006, Fannie Mae was fined $400 million, but executives who had overseen phony accounting techniques to jack up their bonuses faced no criminal charges. That same year, AIG paid $1.6 billion after it was caught in a major accounting scandal that would indirectly lead to its collapse two years later, but no executives at the insurance giant were prosecuted.

All of this behavior set the stage for the crash of 2008, when Wall Street exploded in a raging Dresden of fraud and criminality. Yet the SEC and the Justice Department have shown almost no inclination to prosecute those most responsible for the catastrophe — even though they had insiders from the two firms whose implosions triggered the crisis, Lehman Brothersand AIG, who were more than willing to supply evidence against top executives.

In the case of Lehman Brothers, the SEC had a chance six months before the crash to move against Dick Fuld, a man recently named the worst CEO of all time by Portfolio magazine. A decade before the crash, a Lehman lawyer named Oliver Budde was going through the bank's proxy statements and noticed that it was using a loophole involving Restricted Stock Units to hide tens of millions of dollars of Fuld's compensation. Budde told his bosses that Lehman's use of RSUs was dicey at best, but they blew him off. "We're sorry about your concerns," they told him, "but we're doing it." Disturbed by such shady practices, the lawyer quit the firm in 2006.

Then, only a few months after Budde left Lehman, the SEC changed its rules to force companies to disclose exactly how much compensation in RSUs executives had coming to them. "The SEC was basically like, 'We're sick and tired of you people fucking around — we want a picture of what you're holding,'" Budde says. But instead of coming clean about eight separate RSUs that Fuld had hidden from investors, Lehman filed a proxy statement that was a masterpiece of cynical lawyering. On one page, a chart indicated that Fuld had been awarded $146 million in RSUs. But two pages later, a note in the fine print essentially stated that the chart did not contain the real number — which, it failed to mention, was actually $263 million more than the chart indicated. "They fucked around even more than they did before," Budde says. (The law firm that helped craft the fine print, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, would later receive a lucrative federal contract to serve as legal adviser to the TARP bailout.)

Budde decided to come forward. In April 2008, he wrote a detailed memo to the SEC about Lehman's history of hidden stocks. Shortly thereafter, he got a letter back that began, "Dear Sir or Madam." It was an automated e-response.

"They blew me off," Budde says.

Over the course of that summer, Budde tried to contact the SEC several more times, and was ignored each time. Finally, in the fateful week of September 15th, 2008, when Lehman Brothers cracked under the weight of its reckless bets on the subprime market and went into its final death spiral, Budde became seriously concerned. If the government tried to arrange for Lehman to be pawned off on another Wall Street firm, as it had done with Bear Stearns, the U.S. taxpayer might wind up footing the bill for a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in concealed compensation. So Budde again called the SEC, right in the middle of the crisis. "Look," he told regulators. "I gave you huge stuff. You really want to take a look at this."

But the feds once again blew him off. A young staff attorney contacted Budde, who once more provided the SEC with copies of all his memos. He never heard from the agency again.

"This was like a mini-Madoff," Budde says. "They had six solid months of warnings. They could have done something."

Three weeks later, Budde was shocked to see Fuld testifying before the House Government Oversight Committee and whining about how poor he was. "I got no severance, no golden parachute," Fuld moaned. When Rep. Henry Waxman, the committee's chairman, mentioned that he thought Fuld had earned more than $480 million, Fuld corrected him and said he believed it was only $310 million.

The true number, Budde calculated, was $529 million. He contacted a Senate investigator to talk about how Fuld had misled Congress, but he never got any response. Meanwhile, in a demonstration of the government's priorities, theJustice Department is proceeding full force with a prosecution of retired baseball player Roger Clemens for lying to Congress about getting a shot of steroids in his ass. "At least Roger didn't screw over the world," Budde says, shaking his head.

Fuld has denied any wrongdoing, but his hidden compensation was only a ripple in Lehman's raging tsunami of misdeeds. The investment bank used an absurd accounting trick called "Repo 105" transactions to conceal $50 billion in loans on the firm's balance sheet. (That's $50 billion, not million.) But more than a year after the use of the Repo 105s came to light, there have still been no indictments in the affair. While it's possible that charges may yet be filed, there are now rumors that the SEC and the Justice Department may take no action against Lehman. If that's true, and there's no prosecution in a case where there's such overwhelming evidence — and where the company is already dead, meaning it can't dump further losses on investors or taxpayers — then it might be time to assume the game is up. Failing to prosecute Fuld and Lehman would be tantamount to the state marching into Wall Street and waving the green flag on a new stealing season.

The most amazing noncase in the entire crash — the one that truly defies the most basic notion of justice when it comes to Wall Street supervillains — is the one involving AIG and Joe Cassano, the nebbishy Patient Zero of the financial crisis. As chief of AIGFP, the firm's financial products subsidiary, Cassano repeatedly made public statements in 2007 claiming that his portfolio of mortgage derivatives would suffer "no dollar of loss" — an almost comically obvious misrepresentation. "God couldn't manage a $60 billion real estate portfolio without a single dollar of loss," says Turner, the agency's former chief accountant. "If the SEC can't make a disclosure case against AIG, then they might as well close up shop."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herbert_Walker_IV

Walker comes from a successful family of industrialists and financiers, originally from St. Louis, Missouri. Walker's great-grandfather, George Herbert Walker, was the founder of G. H. Walker & Co., a securities firm, which eventually became part of Merrill Lynch. An avid golfer, he was also the namesake of amateur golf'sWalker Cup. His grandfather, George Herbert Walker, Jr., was a co-founder of the NY Mets and his father, George Herbert Walker III, was U. S. ambassador toHungary. Walker was raised in St. Louis, Missouri and has a younger sister, Carter. Walker's grand-aunt, Dorothy, married Senator Prescott Bush, father of U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush and grandfather of U.S. President George Walker Bush. He is thus a second cousin of former President George W. Bush.

Lehman Brothers board members

Michael L. Ainslie

Then: Private investor and former president and chief executive of Sotheby’s Holdings. A director of the St. Joe Company, Sotheby’s Holdings and Lehman Brothers Bank.

Now: Private investor. Resigned from the board of the St. Joe Company in February.

:{John F. Akers

Then: Private investor and retired chairman of I.B.M.. A director of the W.R. Grace & Company.

Now: Private investor and a director of }:W.R. Grace & Company.

Roger S. Berlind

Then: Theatrical producer and private investor.

Now: Theatrical producer and private investor.

Thomas H. Cruikshank

Then. Retired chairman and chief executive of Halliburton.

Now: Retired.

Marsha Johnson Evans

Then: Rear admiral of the United States Navy (retired). Former president and chief executive of the American Red Cross. A director, Huntsman,Office Depot and Weight Watchers International.

Now: A director of Office Depot and Weight Watchers International.

Richard S. Fuld Jr.

Then: Chairman and chief executive of Lehman Brothers.

Now: Established a boutique firm, Matrix Advisors, affiliated with Legend Securities

:{Sir Christopher Gent

Then: Nonexecutive chairman of GlaxoSmithKline. Senior adviser to Bain & Company. A director of Ferrari.

Now: Nonexecutive chairman of }:GlaxoSmithKline. Senior adviser to Bain & Company. A director of Ferrari and a member of KPMG’s chairman advisory group.

Jerry A. Grundhofer

Then: Chairman emeritus and retired chief executive of U.S. Bancorp. A director of Ecolab and the Midland Company.

Now: A director of Ecolab and the Midland Company, as well as a number of privately held banks. Appointed as a director of Citigroup in 2009 and left in June 2011.

Roland A. Hernandez

Then: Retired chairman and chief executive of the Telemundo Group. A director of MGM Mirage, the Ryland Group, Vail Resorts and Wal-Mart Stores.

Now: A director of MGM Mirage, the Ryland Group, Vail Resorts and Sony.

Henry Kaufman

Then: President of Henry Kaufman & Company.

Now: President of Henry Kaufman & Company.

John D. Macomber

Then: Principal of JDM Investment Group.

Now: Principal of JDM Investment Group.

Sources: Capital IQ, S.E.C. Edgar database, Westlaw, other public sources. sorkin dealbook

intro": Lehman used repo 105 scam; only Ernst & Y wd go for it; no one goes to jail b/c all the players have ties to legal system; even prosecutors will sell out some day. grift

wiki

John F. Lehman, Jr. (born September 14, 1942) is an American investment banker and writer who served as Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration where he promoted the creation of a 600 ship Navy.^[1] In 2003–04 he was a member of the 9/11 Commission.

Lehman currently serves on the National Security Advisory Council for the Center for Security Policy (CSP), and on the board of trustees for the think tank Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). Lehman is also a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States and has signed some policy letters produced by the Project for the New American Century. He also served as an advisor to Sen. John McCain for the 2008 presidential race,^[2][3] and for Mitt Romney in his 2012 bid.^[4]

[hide]

Education and family:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit source:{ | }:edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;background-image:none !important;display:inline !important"):}::{]}:

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he graduated from La Salle College High School and received a B.S. ininternational relations from St. Joseph's University in 1964, gained a B.A. and M.A. from Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge and went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

He is a first cousin, once removed, of the late Grace Kelly (Princess Grace of Monaco), and is Chairman of the Princess Grace Foundation-USA, a public charity established after Princess Grace's death to support emerging artists in film, dance, and theater. He led the American delegation to the funeral of Prince Rainier. He and his family live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Manhattan. He is a long time Republican.his most famous quote is, "Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat." ^[5]

Military career:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit source:{ | }:edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;background-image:none !important;display:inline !important"):}::{]}:

Lehman served in the Air Force Reserve for three years while at Cambridge, then in 1968 left the Air Force Reserve and joined the United States Navy Reserve (then known as the U.S. Naval Reserve) as an ensign, later rising to the rank of commander. Lehman worked for UBS AG, then later was president of Abington Corporation, from 1977 to 1981, when he was appointed by Ronald Reagan to be Secretary of the Navy. As the 65th Secretary, Lehman launched the idea of building a "600-ship Navy". He became Secretary of the Navy at 38, a young age that he was conscious of in his dealing with Admirals. He was unique in still serving as a commander in the Naval Reserve while being Secretary of the Navy. He developed a strategic concept to counter the threat of Soviet incursion into Western Europe known as the "Lehman Doctrine." The plan called for a military response to any Russian invasion in Europe by attacking and invading the Soviet Far East along the Pacific, a much less defended front. Forces would sever the trans Siberian railroad and fight westward toward Moscow.

According to Hedrick Smith, in his book The Power Game, Lehman, lost a fight at the Pentagon with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Thayer over lowering the number of future aircraft carriers planned. He immediately went to the White House where they were unaware of Thayer's decision, and obtained a press release declaring President Reagan had named two of the ships USS *Abraham Lincoln* (CVN-72) and USS *George Washington* (CVN-73), thereby implying that Reagan had endorsed the "600 ship fleet." Lehman was important in the forced retirement of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover. Lehman resigned in 1987. He was subsequently promoted to the rank of captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1989, later retiring from the U.S. Navy as a reserve officer in that rank after 30 years of service.

Later career:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em;color:#555555;"):}:[edit source:{ | }:edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;background-image:none !important;display:inline !important"):}::{]}:

As of 2004, Lehman is chairman of the private equity investment firm J. F. Lehman and Company, as well as chairman of the Hawaii Superferry. Lehman is chairman of the board of OAO Technology Solutions Inc. He is also an honorary member of the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry. As of 2005, he is a member of a number of influential conservative American thinktanks, including the Project for the New American Century, the Heritage Foundation, theForeign Policy Research Institute, the Center for Security Policy, and the Committee on the Present Danger.

After his work in the 9/11 Commission in 2002, there was increased speculation that Lehman might be named to a chief security post within the Bush Administration. Positions suggested included Director of Central Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence and Secretary of Defense (when Donald Rumsfeld stepped down). None of this speculation has proved accurate.

He currently serves as Chairman of the Princess Grace Foundation-USA and as a director of the OpSail Foundation. He is also a member of the board of overseers of the School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, and is a trustee of La Salle College High School.^[6] He has served on the board of directors of the Ball Corporation since 1987. Lehman is also an advisory board member for the Partnership for a Secure America, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to recreating the bipartisan center in American national security and foreign policy.

On June 26, 2012, Lehman revealed to the staff of the United States Naval Institute and in a speech given in Portsmouth, UK, the Reagan Administrationsecretly offered the use of the amphibious assault helicopter carrier *Iwo Jima* as a replacement in case either of the two British carriers, the *Hermes* and the*Invincible*, had been damaged or destroyed during the 1982 Falklands War.^[7] This revelation made headlines in the United Kingdom, but except for the U.S. Naval Institute, not in the United States.^[8][9]

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On Seas of Glory
Command of the Seas
Making War
America the Vulnerable
Fall From Glory: The Men who Sank the U.S. Navy, Gregory L. Vistica

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Born in 1942, and a scion of one of Philadelphia's oldest and wealthiest (banking) families. Lehman can trace his family line back to an aide to William Penn, founder of the Quaker colony. Received a B.S. in international relations from St. Joseph's University in 1964. Bachelor of Arts and Masters of Arts degrees from Cambridge University.

While at Cambridge, Lehman frequently spent weekends at the palace of Prince Rainier and Princess Grace in Monaco, because he is a second cousin of the late Grace Kelly (Princess Grace of Monaco). Received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1974). As a student, he joined the Intercollegiate Student Institute, founded by William Buckley, Jr. (Skull & Bones; CIA; Knights of Malta; Bohemian Grove), and as a graduate student roomed with Edwin Feulner (later Heritage Foundation president; Mont Pelerin Society president; member Le Cercle; Bohemian Grove; etc). Flew combat missions during the Vietnam War.

Served under Henry Kissinger at the National Security Council 1969-1974. He was a delegate to the Vienna Mutual Balanced Force Reductions negotiations 1975-1978. Deputy Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Worked for UBS AG. President of the aerospace consulting firm Abington Corporation 1977-1981. Managing Director Corporate Finance at PaineWebber, Inc. 1981-1987. Secretary of the Navy under Reagan 1981-1987.

Member of the Committee on the Present Danger under Reagan, together with William Casey, Frank Gaffney, George Shultz, and Richard Perle. Was forced to leave the Reagan administration for his extreme anti-communist convictions. Became a trustee of the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank. At the Bohemian Grove in 1991, he delivered a speech in which he claimed that 200,000 Iraqis had been killed in the Gulf War. The speech was called 'Smart Weapons'.

Founder and chairman of J.F. Lehman & Company in 1992. This company invests mainly in small- to mid-sized defense companies and employs a small group of former Joint Chiefs, Admirals, and Marine commanders, together with people fromNASA, Boeing, General Dynamics, United Technologies, Bechtel, the Department of Energy, etc. Lehman has served on the boards of TI Group plc, Westland Helicopter plc Sedgwick plc and all of J.F. Lehman's realized investments. He currently is a director of Ball Corporation, ISO Inc., EnerSys and Hawaii Superferry, Inc. and Chairman of Special Devices, Incorporated and chairman of OAO Technology Solutions, Inc.

He is also Chairman of the Princess Grace Foundation and an Overseer of the School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Has been a member of theHeritage Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations.He has been a member of the 9/11 Commission in 2003 & 2004. Supporter of the Project for the New American Century and pressed for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Lehman himself persists in supporting the administration's claim that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were working together. A 'new revelation' he made on NBC in June 2003 that an Iraqi colonel was an Al-Qaeda operative was violently opposed by the CIA, which claimed that this link had turned out to be bogus a long time ago. Lehman has always been one of the harshest critics of the CIA for its pre- and post-9/1l intelligence. He led the American delegation to the funeral of Prince Rainier in 2005. Has been quoted as saying: "Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat."Member of the Advisory Board of Paribas Affaires Industrielles.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (former NYSE ticker symbol LEH) (pronounced /ˈliːmən/) was a global financial services firm. Before declaring bankruptcy in 2008, Lehman was the fourth largest investment bank in the USA (behind Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch), doing business in investment banking, equity and fixed-income sales and trading (especially U.S. Treasury securities), market research, investment management, private equity, and private banking.

On September 15, 2008, the firm filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection following the massive exodus of most of its clients, drastic losses in its stock, and devaluation of its assets by credit rating agencies. The filing marked the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history,^[4] and is thought to have played a major role in the unfolding of the late-2000s global financial crisis. The following day, **Barclays** announced its agreement to purchase, subject to regulatory approval, Lehman's North American investment-banking and trading divisions along with its New York headquarters building

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Jimmy Cayne wasn't the only one with a private elevator and a taste for helicopter commuting; in fact he was comparatively reasonable. After complaints, he eventually agreed to reserve the elevator for his private use only between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. every day. Richard Fuld, Lehman's CEO, had a different system. Whenever Fuld's limousine approached Lehman headquarters, his chauffeur would call in; a specially programmed elevator would descend to the garage, held there by a guard until he arrived. Then the elevator took Fuld straight to the thirty-first floor, with no stops, so he didn't have to see any of his employees. Stan O'Neal at Merrill Lynch had a private elevator too - namely, any elevator that happened to be around when he arrived. A guard would hold the next elevator that appeared, preventing anyone else from entering and, if necessary, ordering others already in the elevator to leave.

Everyone had limousines and drivers, of course, but there were serious toys, too. When Lehman went bankrupt, it owned a helicopter and six corporate jets. Two of the jets were 767s, which normally seat over 150 people when used by airlines, and cost over $150 million when purchased new. In addition, however, Joe Gregory, Lehman's president (the number two position under Fuld, the CEO), had his own personal helicopter, in which he commuted daily from his mansion in the Hamptons. In bad weather, he sometimes used a seaplane...

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