Real Scenes After the Scene at Lehman Brothers on Friday

First, I gave you the “bad news meeting” photo at the London office of Lehman Brothers. Then I followed up with an imaginary scene that followed. Here, for those of you who like to follow business news, are some real scenes from the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse, courtesy of a Bloomberg News article titled Lehman Workers Clear Desks, Weep After Bankruptcy:

Left: Lehman Brothers employee moving his stuff out of the London office.
Right: Two Lehman New York employees saying goodbye.

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A couple of bits from the article jumped out at me. First, this one about some very new employees:

A 21-year-old Lehman graduate trainee in London, who declined to be identified by name, said he and 90 to 95 colleagues were called in by the human resources department and made redundant. They started work a week ago.

I wonder if those new trainees were the people in the London office photo I posted earlier today.

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Another notable excerpt:

“The Fed didn’t bail us out,” said Khash Sajadi, 32, a vice president in Lehman’s mortgage capital division in London. “That’s the right decision. As a taxpayer, rather than a Lehman employee, you shouldn’t have to foot the bill for someone else’s decision. It’s a sad story for me and very many others.”

It’s nice to see that there are businesspeople who don’t believe in the “privatize profits, socialize losses” mantra.

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One more excerpt:

Sphinx Patterson, who takes a so-called body-pump and step class every Monday afternoon at Lehman’s seventh-floor gym, said the complex was shut today, and the piles of towels had gone.

“People were hugging each other in the corridor,” said Patterson, 35, who’s worked at the gym for five years. “I saw girls crying. They don’t know what to do,” he added.

My thoughts:

• “Sphinx?” This is either a nickname he adopted or his parents are from the Palin school of baby-naming.
• “The piles of towels had gone.” The gym might have gathered up all the towels, but having survived one or two “nights of the long knives”, I believe the more likely scenarios is that they got taken in the sort of mass theft that accompanies mass layoffs.

And finally, for “I saw girls crying. They don’t know what to do.”: This is an interesting one…

• My first thought was “Crying? Over the demise of a bank? I’ve seen much weeping and gnashing of teeth over the closing of small company created and built up by a group of artists and by the employees of various small businesses — cafes, record stores and so on — that went under, but for some reason, it seems weird to cry when a bank for whom your work, especially one that such global reach, goes under. Whether you make minimum wage or a Lehman-level salary, losing your job still hurts.
• My next thought was “Did any of them see this coming, and if so, did they take precautions?” When things were getting a bit iffy at OpenCola, I scaled back my spending and starting putting away extra money. My deadbeat then-housemate also worked for OpenCola and had access to the same information I did, and took no such precautions — my biggest mistake was not kicking him out sooner.
• The thought after that was “How hard would it be to bounce back from losing your job at Lehman?” Given that this is the third major Wall Street shake-up this year, I’m sure that the remaining finance houses are being careful about how they spend their money. Since Generally Accepted Accounting Principles hold that employees are expenses and desks are assets, the number of openings at banks and other financial companies is probably a small one. There’s also the matter of how much debt you’re in when you’re fired. Given that New York and London are two of the world’s most expensive cities, that could be a lot.
• And finally, I hit my bank’s web site and checked my credit card balance. This is the financial equivalent of throwing salt over your shoulder or crossing yourself when a funeral procession passes you by. My balance is zero, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not get fired or laid off right now.