{"id":2815,"date":"2009-05-06T12:40:30","date_gmt":"2009-05-06T17:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=2815"},"modified":"2009-05-06T12:40:30","modified_gmt":"2009-05-06T17:40:30","slug":"profiling-holy-cross-grad-mark-walsh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=2815","title":{"rendered":"Profiling Holy Cross Grad Mark Walsh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Devin Leonard for the Times<\/em>\u00a0wrote this weekend about Mark Walsh, formerly of Lehman Brothers. The article portrays him as one of Wall Street’s top deal makers whose decisions were one of the major factors that led directly to the fall of the bank. Yet the article is also strangely positive<\/a> in describing Walsh.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What stood out for me most were the numerous connections Walsh has to me. As the article describes his brief biography:<\/p>\n

Mr. Walsh grew\u00a0up in Yonkers, the son of a lawyer who once served as chairman of the\u00a0New York City Housing Authority. He attended Iona Preparatory School in New Rochelle; the College of the Holy Cross, where he majored in economics; and, finally, the\u00a0Fordham University\u00a0School of Law.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then a bit later:<\/p>\n

He bankrolled Tishman Speyer in its purchase of the\u00a0Chrysler Building\u00a0in 1997.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am a fellow alumnus of Holy Cross – a fact which by itself causes me to be irrationally positive about individuals, from Chris Matthews<\/a> to Bob Cousy to Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau<\/a>. He also went to Fordham Law – which is one of the schools I am considering. And I currently work in the Chrysler Building. All tenuous connections, but enough to make me root for the guy.<\/p>\n

Of course, it’s hard to get around the damning nature of this reporting:<\/p>\n

[I]t wasn\u2019t long before Mr. Walsh found a way to do an even bigger deal with Mr. Speyer\u2019s company. In May 2007, Lehman and Tishman Speyer offered to buy\u00a0Archstone-Smith Trust, a $22 billion deal struck at the peak of an already dangerously frothy market. Tishman Speyer put up a mere $250 million of its own equity. Lehman, in a 50-50 partnership with\u00a0Bank of America, put up $17.1 billion of debt and $4.6 billion in bridge equity financing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The most enlightening aspect of the article were the way in which it spotlighted the oddness of what was going on. Leonard describes one of Walsh’s biggest clients pulling out his money saying that:<\/p>\n

\u00a0[T]he real estate market \u2014 and, indeed, the entire financial system behind it \u2014 was becoming increasingly bizarre.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In an example of this from 1997 – well before this observation – Leonard describes one of Walsh’s coups – how he managed to steer Lehman clear of the financial crisis resulting from the failure of Long Term Capital Management that Nassim Nicholas Taleb had predicted at the time:<\/p>\n

On the eve of the\u00a0financial crisis\u00a0brought by the near collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, Lehman flushed $3.6 billion in commercial real estate loans through its securitization machine, avoiding some of the losses that crippled other firms, including Nomura and\u00a0Credit Suisse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I hate to say it – but I have no idea what that means. And that’s not unintional – at least according to a lecture given by <\/a>Financial Times<\/a><\/em>\u00a0reporter Gillian Tett<\/a> at the London School of Economics. (A lecture very much worth listening to – and which I will blog about later.)<\/p>\n

But to demonstrate the oddly positive take on Walsh, here’s how Leonard concludes his piece:<\/p>\n

His friends say they believe that Mr. Walsh will eventually emerge from the rubble of Lehman\u2019s collapse and return to deal-making.<\/p>\n

\u201cGuys like this are very rare,\u201d says Mr. Rosen, the developer. \u201cHe\u2019ll be back. He picked up the phone and people listen. Nobody can take that away from him.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Back in the game perhaps – but hopefully a bit wiser.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Devin Leonard for the Times\u00a0wrote this weekend about Mark Walsh, formerly of Lehman Brothers. The article portrays him as one of Wall Street’s top deal makers whose decisions were one of the major factors that led directly to the fall of the bank. Yet the article is also strangely positive in describing Walsh.\u00a0 What stood […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[47,1032,32],"tags":[67,1760,1757,172,1763,2992,1090,886,1762,1764,1759,1758,148,1761,128],"class_list":["post-2815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criticism","category-financial-crisis-economics","category-holy-cross","tag-chris-matthews","tag-chrysler-building","tag-devin-leonard","tag-financial-times","tag-gillian-tett","tag-holy-cross","tag-jon-favreau","tag-lehman-brothers","tag-london-school-of-economics","tag-long-term-capital-management","tag-mark-a-walsh","tag-mark-walsh","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-tishman-speyer","tag-wall-street"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8qcx-Jp","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2815"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2817,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2815\/revisions\/2817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}