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Skip to content. Divided Decade. Share Now on:. Two employees of Christie's auction house manoeuvre the Lehman Brothers corporate logo on Sept. Share Now:. She was insecure about the future and wondered, "If I could lose this job, what else could I lose? In the aftermath of the bankruptcy, she stayed on to finish out her clients' deals. Since, she's worked as a lawyer at a handful of smaller financial companies, where she says she makes half of what she made at Lehman. At one point in time, Charles Kwalwasser would have been happy to spend his entire career at Lehman Brothers.
When he was first hired as an intellectual property attorney at the investment bank in , it was an exciting milestone. He went on to build the bank's patent portfolio. He never considered that his job could be in jeopardy. First, he moved over to Barclay 's, which bought Lehman's core businesses after its bankruptcy. Then he moved on to a start-up of community-based inventions, but that also ultimately ended in bankruptcy. Now, he works as general counsel at another start-up called Bark , a dog products company.
He thinks about how different his working life has been from his father's. As a child, Kwalwasser watched his dad spend his entire career at just two major institutions: the New York Stock Exchange and the Securities and Exchange Commission. At only 41, he himself has already worked for five different employers and wouldn't be surprised if that number doubles before he retires. He hopes to one day return to a buried passion for real estate and architecture. And while his uniform at Lehman Brother's was a suit and tie, nowadays he saunters into work dressed as he would be on a vacation.
When Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Renee Spero, an assistant vice president there, was 10 weeks pregnant. That tumultuous weekend, she couldn't peel her eyes away from the television screen.
Spero had started at the investment bank five years earlier as a financial analyst and worked her way up to assistant vice president. She had met her husband at the company and she imagined spending her entire career at the bank.
She moved over to Barclay's very briefly after the investment bank failed, but found her job was redundant there. She tried to land a similar job at another bank, to no avail. The competition was intense, as many other people were thrown into unemployment and looking for work at the same time.
The salaries being offered her would barely cover the cost of child care for her son and daughter. She decided to stop looking for jobs at banks and now is a stay-at-home mother. However, she puts in a few hours a week at a local nursery school in New Jersey where they live. Her husband, meanwhile, still works in finance. Now that she's been out of the field for a decade, she questions how easy it would be to re-enter it.
Her life seems to have permanently changed course with the fall of Lehman. I do remember my college classmates panicking — one friend who also had an offer from Lehman was reading the papers every day as the stock price fell and kept trying to call them to check on her job. When they filed for bankruptcy, I learned it from a newspaper. I started applying to a million different places, in full frantic mode. We have Barclays! People are losing their jobs and all you can think about is yourselves.
The role Lehman had offered me was in Boston, but that office was gone now and if I wanted to keep the Barclays job, I had to move to New York. There were a lot of culture clashes between the Lehman people and Barclays people, who were much more stern. Maybe because the company is British? If we had a meeting at 10 a. We were a bit more approachable. I stayed there for three more years. I no longer work in the finance industry, and part of that is because I started to really believe the people in it were evil.
I remember listening to colleagues mocking the people protesting outside, with this true sense that they were better than them, and it made me so angry. How can you be so snobbish?
Especially after everything that happened. Lehman Brothers came to recruit at my college the spring of , my senior year. To walk into that beautiful, dramatic lobby every morning: It was really exciting.
On our first day, Tuesday, Sept. As he talked, we just watched the stock price drop. Over the weekend of the 14th and 15th, people were going into the office and getting their stuff out, but I had no stuff. Then I got texts from other analysts that the building was in lockdown. We got the email at midnight on Sunday night: Lehman had filed for bankruptcy. I was actually lucky to be brand new: Barclays bought up my analyst class.
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