Exposed: Dick Fuld, the man who brought the world to its kneesDick Fuld ran Lehman Brothers as if he were at war. He drove the bank hard and ignored the signs of collapse. Andrew Gowers, former editor of the Financial Times, who was working at the heart of the bank as it brought the global economy to the brink of disaster, reveals the inside story
The temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees as the boss’s voice came on the speaker phone. “I don’t think we’re going bust this afternoon,” he said, “but I can’t be 100% sure about that. A lot of strange things are happening . . .” The four of us gathered in Lehman Brothers’ offices at Canary Wharf looked at each other, our eyes widening. We had just spent the day bashing the phones in a frantic effort to reassure journalists, investors, bankers, anyone who would listen. That was our job as members of Lehman’s communications team. The bank was fine, we kept saying. It was brimming with cash. Sure, the share price had dropped 48% in New York, but that was a panic reaction to another investment bank’s collapse and nothing to do with us. What’s more, the US authorities had indicated they would not allow another institution to fail. Yet here was one of Lehman’s top people admitting privately that even he could not be certain that a sudden, precipitous and contagious loss of market confidence would not sweep his firm, its 26,000-plus employees and its 158-year-old name into oblivion. It was only then that it fully dawned on me just how scarily unpredictable my world had become. The date was March 17, 2008, the day after Lehman’s smaller New York rival, Bear Stearns, had collapsed into the arms of one of the world’s largest banks, the mighty JP Morgan Chase, in a shotgun marriage that all but wiped out shareholders and cost thousands of highly paid traders their jobs. On Wall Street blind panic had ensued and its focus was Lehman Brothers. The market has a phrase for this sort of event: the death spiral. Creditors and trading partners take fright at a falling share price and threaten to cut off credit lines. Alarm is magnified by modern, instant communications. Fear feeds on itself and prophecies of doom become self-fulfilling. Our freewheeling, globally integrated financial markets turn out to be built on sand. The group of us sitting in Canary Wharf could see the scenario with terrifying clarity that day. The market, cruel and unforgiving, was asking whether Lehman, now the smallest and most vulnerable of the so-called “bulge bracket” of elite global investment banks, was next. It was. On September 15, Lehman Brothers Holdings filed in New York for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. An institution with total assets of $639 billion – more than the gross domestic product of Argentina and roughly 10 times the size of Enron when it filed for bankruptcy protection in December 2001…

 Healthcare reform vote: sweet victory for ObamaWinning the vote for healthcare reform in Congress last night showed that Obama was right to keep fighting Richard Adams guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 March 2010 Article historyAfter winning the healthcare reform vote in Congress, President Obama took to the airwaves to sell it. Photograph: AFPSome myths got slain last night in Washington DC. For one thing, the Democratic party rediscovered its vertebrae and used it, for a change, to pass healthcare reform. For another, the myth that the US political structure is broken and cannot digest fundamental issues … well, it took a dent.Minutes after the final passage of the bills through the House of Representatives, President Obama got on with selling the reforms to the American public, going live on television despite the late hour. "This is what change looks like," Obama said, minutes before midnight, tying together his election promises of change with his commitments to reforming healthcare. "We proved that this government of the people and by the people still works for the people."Obama looked exhausted, having spent the weekend winning over House Democrats. Bismark's epigram equating the messy business of passing legislation and making sausages has been repeated so often during Congress's healthcare debate that US cable news viewers on Sunday night might have expected to see meat-grinders operating in Congress.But if there was any blood on the floor during the closing moments of the vote on healthcare reform, it came from the Republican party, whose members looked dangerously close to opening their own veins.

There was John Boehner, the most senior House Republican, giving a splenetic harangue punctuated with "Hell no!", in place of summing up his party's case. Then there was the mystery Republican congressman who shouted "baby killer" at Democrat Bart Stupak when Stupak swatted away a Republican procedural amendment aimed at killing the bill.Stupak was a vital figure yesterday. It was his last-minute deal with Obama that led his bloc of conservative, anti-abortion Democrats to vote for the bill. That was why the Democratic leadership looked relaxed as the final vote approached. Shortly after 10.45pm, the floor of the House erupted into cheers as the 216th "yea" vote, the crucial casting one, sent healthcare reform onto the statute books and into the history books.Nancy Pelosi, the speaker, had consistently predicted that she would have the votes when it came down to it. Once again, Pelosi delivered, proving herself to be the best Democratic parliamentary manager since Sam Rayburn. At this rate they'll have to name a building after her.But since nothing is ever perfect in Washington, there's always room for criticism. They call it "Monday morning quarterbacking" in America – using the benefit of hindsight to sound insightful about the tactics that a team should have used. It's Monday morning and there will be plenty of quarterbacking going on over the healthcare reform vote last night, most of…

 Is 54 Too Old to Work at Google?"An old man," "sluggish," "an old fuddy-duddy" – those are some of the choice terms that Brian Reid, an experienced engineer, alleges that his former colleagues at Google used to describe him before he was fired ... Read Article

  Brendan Smialowski for The New York TimesC.I.A. Still Cagey About Oswald DocumentsBy SCOTT SHANE The agency is fighting to keep secret documents about an anti-Castro group that clashed with Lee Harvey Oswald. Jefferson Morley, a journalist, has pursued the files   

 Democrats' tactics worsen their problems
By Michael Gerson
Friday, August 6, 2010
 Politicians under stress tend to confirm, not refute, the criticisms that got them into trouble in the first place. Vacillating politicians vacillate. Thin-skinned politicians explode. Democrats are now feeling enormous political stress. Independents have fled the Obama coalition, largely out of concern about debt, deficits and spending. Intensity is all on the Republican and conservative side. A recent Gallup poll found that the percentage of Republican voters who say they are "very enthusiastic" about voting in 2010 is twice the percentage of Democrats who say the same (44 percent to 22 percent). President Obama's job approval rating now flirts with 40 percent, with solid majorities disapproving of his handling of the economy, deficits and health care. On this trajectory, Democrats see the House slipping away, their Senate majority threatened and a president now too divisive to profitably appear in many districts. So how have national Democrats decided to respond? With a series of tactics that make their worst problems worse. First is the depiction of Republicans as the "party of no," populated by obstructionists blocking needed measures to create jobs and improve the economy. Vice President Biden recently applied this critique to the stimulus package. "There's a lot of people [who] at the time argued it was too small," he said. If it had not been for Republican opposition, "I think it would have been bigger." No doubt it would have been. This is Biden's response to American economic anxiety: If Democrats had even greater control in Washington -- even larger influence than holding the presidency and both houses of Congress -- they would have spent more than $862 billion on the stimulus. Rather than allaying the fiscal concerns of independents, Biden is actively feeding these fears -- thereby making the case for the moderating effects of divided government. With health reform and massive spending, Democrats have picked a fight on the size and role of government. The Republican response, at this point, consists mainly of yelling "Stop!" In a presidential race -- which demands a positive domestic agenda -- this would not be sufficient. In a midterm referendum on the performance of the president and Congress, it seems like more than enough. A second tactic has been to identify Republicans with Tea Party extremism, the way Democrats once tried to identify Republicans with the religious right. As in that earlier case, there are extremes that deserve criticism. But about a quarter to a third of Americans identify in one way or another with the Tea Party movement. As William Galston of the Brookings Institution points out, Americans currently place themselves on the ideological spectrum closer to the Tea Party movement than they do to the Democratic Party, which they view as increasingly liberal. Crude Democratic attacks on the Tea Party offend a broad group of voters. And the political intensity of conservative populists is only increased by elite disdain. The third response to declining…