Lehman Brothers Inc.

The gory fallout from the mortgage crisis is more nightmarish in Middle America—where there are “Foreclosures R Us!” ads (with actual exclamation points) in some local real estate sales pamphlets—but be sure to pity Park Avenue, too.

Earlier this month, The Observer pointed out that four Lehman Brothers executives had spent, before their firm’s fall, a combined $46.58 million on spreads in one Manhattan building alone. Besides the fact that the city suddenly has a lot less super-rich home buyers to snatch super-expensive real estate, there’s the question of what will happen to the marble-floored mega-apartments that all our freshly fallen executives bought at their peaks.  read more »

Down on Wall Street, the word of the hour is “deleveraging.” In the financial markets, deleveraging is a brutal and unpleasant thing, where lots of innocents get badly hurt.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have become plain old-fashioned bank holding companies. Lehman declared bankruptcy. The bull (Merrill) and the Bear (Stearns) have both been incorporated ignominiously into vastly larger megabanks.

Six years into his stewardship of Charlotte-based Bank of America, Ken Lewis, who was widely credited with turning the bank over from being a regional player into a powerful, diversified bank, admitted to $527 million in losses on debt products.  read more »

Kevin Phillips was a top aide to Richard Nixon 40 years ago (he coined the term “Sun Belt”). Since then, he’s turned into a professional scold, warning particularly about the nation’s dependency on the financial services industry.

Mr. Phillips, author of Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, fortuitously published earlier this year, e-mailed on Monday evening his thoughts about the unfolding fiscal crisis: “There’s very little excuse for Wall Street’s sad but pervasive mixture of myopia and incompetence. Clues to the excesses were everywhere.”

It’s O.K., in other words, not to feel too badly about what went down with Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, et al.  read more »

It seems at least slightly likely that the days of Wall Street’s onyx-coated hyper-prosperity are over, and that New York’s era of perpetually broken real estate records (the hedge fund manager Scott Bommer paid $46 million for a co-op in January; in July, a Tisch heir was said to be paying $48 million for a co-op; this month Mr. Bommer sold his place for $48.8 million) was some sort of fleeting, irrational fluke.

But whereas everyone long ago accepted that American homeowners hugely erred by assuming their home values could only go up, and that Wall Street went even further astray by borrowing billions to make sour mortgage investments based on that optimism, the top tier of New York City’s real estate market still seems to consider itself magically protected.  read more »

With Lehman Brothers bruised and staggered from its $2.8 billion loss in the second quarter, analysts and financial pundits have been writing rough-draft predictions that the bank may soon be joining Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and Bear Stearns as an institution in free fall, an institution that, despite its best efforts, simply could not overcome the unforgiving gravity exerted by the mortgage-backed securities meltdown. And while Lehman’s posting of its first quarterly deficit since going public 14 years ago is cause for concern, the bank’s shareholders, and Wall Street at large, began to breathe a bit easier this week as the firm’s chief executive officer, Richard Fuld, stepped up to take sole responsibility for his firm’s troubles.  read more »

Crain's is reporting that Robert Lieber, a managing director of Lehman Brothers, has accepted the presidency of the city's Economic Development Corporation. Mr. Lieber would take over from Andrew Alper, a former COO of Goldman Sachs, who left the EDC post in June after four years. - Tom Acitelli

"The problem with Wall Street," my lunch companion remarked, "was that in a firm employing many thou  read more »

Lehman Brothers managing director John Kasich kicks back inthe plush leather chair in his corner off  read more »

Back in the early 1960's, when passage of the InterestEqualization Tax made it clear that a fair pie  read more »

Michael Stern, the 20-year-old founder of the much-ballyhooed and now defunct Internet incubator Aqu  read more »

That Lehman Brothers convertible-bond analyst Ravi Suria came out with a scorchingly negative "avoid  read more »

When I began this column, my son Francis had only just celebrated his first birthday.  read more »