Daily Telegraph Report About Dick Fuld K.O. is Bollocks

New York magazine reports that the story that’s been circulating about Dick Fuld (former CEO of failed bank Lehman’s) and a parallel rumour about an assault on former Bear Stearns CEO Alex Schwartz, is total fiction.

‘”[A]ccording to Fuld’s people…: “It’s absolutely untrue,” said a spokesperson now representing Lehman in bankruptcy court. “It never happened.”

Alex Greenberg, general manager of the Lehman fitness center, backed them up. “The statement that he was punched is not true,” he said, adding that I was the first person to ask. “It’s a matter of fact that he has not visited the club since the bankruptcy. We’re not even open on Sundays.” The knockout was said to have occurred on Sunday, September 21.”‘

The ease with which some of our newspapers over here printed it, including the Daily Telegraph, is probably a measure of our collective appetite for tidbits of schadenfreude relating to dodgy bankers.

I feel like that schadenfreude, as ugly as it might seem, is pretty much justified and should be allowed to peculate. As we argued yesterday, someone has got to be put in the metaphoric media stocks over this. This is our one chance to hammer home to a pack of charlatans dressing themselves up as experts, and trading under names like the Oracle, that having a simple grasp of economic jargon should not guarantee the predominance of their radical ideologies.

But perhaps there is a case to be made for curtailing this gloating a little. While Bojo’s defence of the banking industry seems a bit unpalatable, I think Emily Monk sums it up pretty well, writing for Dublin University student newspaper Trinity News:

““Capitalism has got its comeuppance,” Jarvis Cocker said the other day. And he is certainly not alone in his derision. Nick Clegg, the British Liberal Democrat leader, basked in applause after pouring contempt on the “City boys” who had made more money than him. The public is gripped by a gleeful and ugly schadenfreude. For one, it is these bankers who are largely responsible for turning Britain, amongst others, into a global economic power. They filled the restaurants, funded the academies, bought the art and employed the builders. For the last two decades investment banking has attracted the cream of business graduates. The brightest, most ambitious and hardworking students left top universities and entered the City. Since then, their weeks have merged together and their wives and children have traded weekend trips and family meals for deeper pockets. It is the greed of just a few unscrupulous cowboys, who feverishly grasped at even higher short-term profits and who lent so unwisely, which has left so many high and dry. John O’Hagan, a Professor of Economics here in Trinity, commented that “there are tens of thousands of hardworking individuals within banking, who are in no way responsible, but could suffer with their jobs”. And let’s not forget the cleaners, secretaries, post-room men and drivers who are in an equally unstable position and who have never enjoyed stratospheric salaries and daily liquid lunches.”

Posted by Becky North in Hot Money | October 16, 2008 1:53PM |