Lehman Brothers Collapse +5: “The Diversity Division Had A Bigger Budget And More People Than Risk Management!” by Steve Sailer

“Joe’s mission for diversity drove [Christine Daley, head of distressed-debt research] mad. She had no time for any of it, but Joe Gregory had us all over a barrel: he had major control over our bonus compensation, and he made it clear there would be extra money for those who rallied to his cause. Most of us did not care about the cause, but the prospect of this thirty-first-floor sycophant lopping a couple of hundred thousand off our annual check because we weren’t in there pitching for the cause of the day was seriously irritating.”

With the fifth anniversary of the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing Great Financial Crash coming up on Sunday, I dug up an over-written bookimage, A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, by a Lehman employee named Lawrence G. McDonald. He’s not the best prose stylist in the world, but he sounds like a Wall Street guy, all right. Here’s a description of Lehman in the mid-2000s:

One of these was our corporate president, Joe Gregory, the right-hand man of the reclusive CEO, Dick Fuld. … But Joe Gregory was a regular, run-of-the-mill, ho-hum financial sycophant, devoted to his master, Richard Fuld, … Joe’s fixation was a subject called diversity. He was consumed with it. His aim was the mission of inclusion. He had an entire department devoted to it, headed up by a managing director. Great rallies were staged in New York’s auditoriums, with free cocktails and hors d’oeuvres served for up to six hundred people, all listening to Joe or one of his henchmen pontificating. “Inclusion! That must be our aim!” he would yell, as if we were running a friggin’ prayer meeting. … Which was all very well, but down in the trenches, where a trader might sweat blood to make a couple of million dollars, most of us were a bit tetchy about Joe Gregory going off and spending it on a cocktail party for six hundred people.

… Especially when it emerged that the top dog in diversity was earning well over $2 million a year and that the diversity division had a bigger budget and more people than risk management!

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