How it goes down at Lehman Brothers

“It’s over,” announced Christian Meissner to a morning staff gathering just a week after being appointed to run Lehman Brothers in Europe. He told the staff to look for new work and “move on”. Staff had little choice but to follow suit in Lehman’s offices around the globe… leaving workplaces with belongings hastily collected and their savings depleted.

The mantra of Lehman Brothers was to pay its staff in stock – some 30 per cent of the bank’s equity was held by employees and many bonuses were paid in shares. Now those holdings are all but worthless. Some staff were also told not to expect a paycheck at the end of the month and that they might even be liable for expenses on their corporate credit cards.

The Chief Executive Officer is also suffering. Between 1993 and 2007 he made half a BILLION dollars in compensation, but his severance package has been decimated...

Fuld would potentially "walk away with at least in the neighborhood of $60 million, which is a lot, but it is a lot less than $600 million that he was worth 10 months ago," said David Schmidt, a senior consultant at the pay advisory firm.

See, it's only $60 million; that should be some consolation to the staff...

(For those interested in things like this, there's also a long, biased and counter-biased ranting thread on this topic at Reddit)