Too Big to Fail [163]
Reports of Fuld’s possible ouster reached new heights when word spread that morning that John D. Macomber, one of Lehman’s board members and the former CEO of the chemical giant Celanese Corporation, had arrived at the building and was headed for the thirty-first floor. Almost a dozen people were milling about Fuld’s corner office when they saw Macomber, who was eighty years old, hobbling down the hallway toward them. Several began to leave as Macomber got to the door, expecting they would soon be asked to excuse themselves.
“Stay,” Macomber ordered them.
Fuld, looking haggard, greeted Macomber with a handshake. He didn’t think he was getting fired, but he could sense the nervousness in the room.
“I want to talk to you,” Macomber said, and though for a moment some of the bankers thought he indeed intended to tell Fuld that his services were no longer required, he instead launched, to everyone’s surprise, into a rousing speech to rally the troops.
“I want everyone in the room to know that I know that you guys have done a good job,” he said. “This was just bad luck. We’re one hundred percent behind all of you.”
Fuld’s board, it seemed, was still loyally Fuld’s board.
Rodgin Cohen was still over at Sullivan & Cromwell’s Midtown offices trying to coax Bank of America into buying Lehman. But he could tell something had gone wrong; Greg Curl’s body language had changed, and the BofA team seemed as if it had slowed down, as if it had already decided against bidding.
Cohen, who was one of the few lawyers in the city who had direct access to Tim Geithner, dialed his office to report his suspicions that the government’s hard line against offering any help had scared Bank of America away.
“I don’t think this deal can get done without government assistance,” Cohen stressed to Geithner. “They may be bluffing us, and they may be bluffing you. But we can’t afford to call that bluff.”
Geithner, who had expressed similar worries to Paulson the day before but had been told to stand down, was succinct in his response: “You can’t count on government assistance.”
At about 2:20 p.m., just as Lehman’s shares fell another 6 percent to $3.59, Hank Paulson, visibly frazzled, ran downstairs and out of the Treasury Building to head to the airport. Dan Jester, Jim Wilkinson, and Paulson’s assistant, Christal West, jumped in his Suburban with him. Christopher Cox was planning to meet them at the airplane.
On a call just hours earlier, he and Geithner had officially determined that something needed to be done about Lehman.
If they really were going to convene all the CEOs on Wall Street and try to urge them to come up with a private-market solution, now was the time to do it. Otherwise, by Monday, Lehman would be unsalvageable. “We have the weekend,” he reminded them.
They settled on setting up a meeting at 6:00 p.m. at the New York Fed. Geithner’s office wouldn’t start calling all the CEOs until just past 4:00 p.m., after the market had closed. The last thing they could afford was for news of the meeting to leak.
Paulson, who usually made the trip to New York on US Airways, which offered a government discount—Wendy had always given him grief about flying in a private jet—arranged