Can Lehman Brothers survive short sellers?
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/...97,24326690-643,00.htmlAndrew Main, business editor | September 11, 2008
IF there's any life left in 164-year-old Wall Street broker Lehman Brothers, it wasn't that apparent yesterday.
The street's smallest top-line broker was always going to be under the hammer after its nearest rival, Bear Stearns, was rescued back in March, and it's now in a near-inescapable downward spiral.
Nervousness about Lehman's ability to raise much needed capital depressed the share price by 45 per cent in one day, Tuesday, thus making the raising all the harder.
But it's not the worst offender, by a mile.
In the past year Lehman wrote off $US8.2 billion ($10.1 billion) and raised $US13.9 billion, chump change compared with the Big Three offenders, Citi, Merrill Lynch and UBS.
They're all still out there writing business even though they've written off more than $US40 billion each -- and not one of them has raised enough to cover their write-offs.
As Bill Clinton might say, it's the scale, stupid.
Lehman was yesterday reduced to promising "key strategic initiatives" a week earlier than planned, amid talk that something big would have to be sold, and soon.
The trigger for Tuesday's lurch was Korea Development Bank's announcement that it was not a buyer.
So what went wrong? You can laugh now that two years ago the group was voted Most Admired Securities Firm by Fortune magazine, or that one of the directors is a retired female US Navy rear admiral who's also on the board of Weight Watchers International.
There's even a Broadway producer called Roger Berlind, who's on the board's audit and risk committees.
You could argue that theatrical types would know better than most what a risk profile is.
But they're just quirks and oddities: they're not company killers. Lehman is a behemoth by any other than US standards, with shareholders equity of about $US32billion -- well able to cover some $US3 billion of expected further write-downs related to real estate.
It's in the wrong place at the wrong time, the sovereign funds are getting tired of stumping up to save top-line broking houses and the short sellers are buzzing round like a swarm of hornets.
It's worth noting that Lehman has faced worse trouble before and survived.
It was founded in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1844 by German immigrant Henry Lehman as a cotton trader.
He was joined by his two brothers Emanuel and Mayer but, to quote the company: "The Civil War disrupted Lehman's business. When hostilities ended, the brothers moved north and concentrated their operations in New York, where they helped establish the Cotton Exchange."
Those lines smack of heroic understatement.
If they can get over being on the losing side in a civil war, they shouldn't have much trouble shaking off the sub-prime crisis.
The biggest problem they have is that back in the 1860s they didn't suffer reputational risk because no one knew who they were. They do now.