The culture of the employees, the trading floor [as depicted in Money Never Sleeps]…I thought all that was pretty good, though some of the machines looked funky. And those equity guys were portrayed very accurately, like the lugheads that that know their stories on a couple of [stocks]. At Lehman the difference between equity floor and the fixed income floor was like night and day. It's like the Harvard, MIT crowd in fixed income and then it's like UMass on the equity floor. So many equity guys totally got blind-sided. They didn't understand credit derivatives, and they just were so wrapped up in their own little stories.-- Lawrence McDonald, managing director at Pangea Capital, previously VP of distressed debt and convertible securities trading at Lehman Brothers, and guy for whom the Wall Street sequel was "hard to watch" because it "brought back a lot of bad memories." [TDB]
Everybody Give It Up For Lehman Brothers!
"We are proud to announce Lehman's exit from chapter 11 and entrance into the final stage of this process -- distributions to creditors. Our objective remains to provide the best results possible for creditors -- by continuing to strategically position assets to produce strong values, to pursue the resolution of disputed claims and other matters in litigation, and to manage expenses in line with the asset disposition process," said John Suckow, who is managing director with bankruptcy adviser Alvarez & Marsal and Lehman's president and COO. Suckow also thanked Lehman employees for working "diligently" since the bank's collapse in September 2008 to reach the milestone. [NYP]