Barclays: do you employ these psychopaths?
Felix Salmon directs us to a blog post in which former Lehman executives (possibly safely employed by Barclays) talk about the Valukas report.
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/03/17/repo-105-like-whatever/
Felix rightly describes these people as psychopaths.
I am not going to further roast these executives – I just want to know how much of this culture infected Barclays.
It remains a source of amazement to me that Barclays came out of the crisis so well. Sure they got a (real) bargain buying Lehman’s US Broker-Dealer. But they were hardly Snow White and their leverage levels were way higher than Lehman. Moreover the crash-or-crash-through attitude of Bob Diamond would not have been out of place at the most aggressive (failed) hedge fund. [The first post on this blog that got more than 30 readers was on Barclays – and – unlike many of my early posts – it looked very good for a while – but less good in the long run.]
Barclays is here and prospering so my pre-crisis view of the investment banks (that Lehman and Barclays would be the troubled ones) did not turn out precisely right.
John
PS. Sorry for the absence of posts – but I was busy walking from Mallacoota to Wonboyn and there were no people, phones, internet or stock quotes.