Look after the pennies …

by | Aug 30, 2010 | Economic Intrigue, Just plain weird, Well I never.

Via Bloomberg, an interesting little tale about the days following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers (emphasis mine) :

“Lehman’s books were in such a mess that I don’t think they knew where they were,” Elizabeth James, a director of Barclays’s futures business, testified today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. James worked on Barclays’s purchase of Lehman’s brokerage during the 2008 financial crisis.

She said she received an e-mail from former Barclays trading executive Stephen King saying Lehman had “absolutely no idea” if it had sold $2 billion more options than it had bought, or whether it owned $4 billion more than it had sold.

Hardly surprising then that they went bankrupt but it also makes you wonder just exactly what the regulators had been playing at to allow them to get into that state in the first place.

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