(un)Happy Anniversary!

Well, we have begun to be treated to the first of what are sure to be dozens of pieces marking Tuesday's One Year Anniversary of the death of Lehman Brothers. Everyone should remember just how dire the global financial situation seemed in the wake of Lehman's bankruptcy. We at Risk Talent Associates and GlobalRiskJobs certainly remember, as like many who make their living in and around Wall Street, it was a time like no other. "Bulge Bracket" firms disappearing seemingly overnight, stock markets plunging, and of course, the layoffs. Yet, even in those darkest of days, we advised that things would indeed get better at some point, and job seekers needed to get up off the canvas and be ready for that time. Certainly, the first order of business was to use all means necessary to stabilize the system, but when that financial triage was finished, players (particularly regulators) would turn their attention to figuring out how to never let us get in that position again. As I stated in the blog last week, much of that push to reform has been bogged down in political wrangling, shifting of the topic to healthcare, etc. But, just as we start to doubt the Administration's resolve, Here comes President Obama to Wall Street to stoke the fire of reform by reminding us of where we were a year ago. Obama’s speech apparently will focus on the need to take the next series of steps on financial regulatory reform, enacting safeguards to ensure such a crisis doesn’t happen again. Let's hope he can jump start the process and push us through this period of "regulatory limbo".

As we consider the Lehman collapse a year later, there will be many arguments either way that letting Lehman fail was either the right/wrong thing to do. Joe Nocera of the NY Times had a good piece on Saturday where he reconsiders the Lehman failure. My own thoughts about this haven't changed much over the year. I believe that when a Bear Stearns failure became inevitable, the Powers-that-Be (Paulson, Bernanke, et. al.) decided they would give the U.S. banks and investment banks a "Mulligan". Against the pure capitalist philosophy of non-intervention, they rushed in to arrange the orderly sale of Bear to JPM. In its wake, the warning was given: the next guy wouldn't be so lucky. Whether that "next guy" was going to be Lehman, Merrill, Morgan Stanley or someone else (not Goldman of course, being too well-connected), it seemed pretty clear there was going to be some BIG financial institution that would become a lab rat for too-big-to-fail. Unfortunately for its employees and investors, lehman won the race to the bottom and the experiment was in full force. Everyone would find out just what happens and how far-reaching the repercussions are when one of these institutions fails. Well, the rest is well-documented and we can probably say the result was the ability of Paulson to light a fire under Congress and get the resources to fight the crisis. Step 2, however, is far from complete. We still need to figure out how to structure or regulate the system in a way that allows risk taking without the collateral damage that was clearly part of the Lehman failure. Maybe Obama can get that process back on track this week.