Posts tagged as Lehman Brothers
Lehman Brothers Art Fire Sale at Sotheby's Totals Out at Just $12 Million
The "fire sale" of the Lehman Brothers art collection went so-so. Some serious bargains were grabbed; some things-this Richter lithograph-went for well above estimate. The big Julie Mehretu painting (everyone, where everyone is Goldman Sachs and their like, has one!) seems oddly like a bargain at a million dollars. The Neo Rauch, at half a million, mid-estimate, seems like a great buy. The John Currin went for a very low price. And so the circle of boom and bust continues unabated etc.
The Lehman Emails Make Your Household Tax Process Look Top-Notch
Here's a look at how Lehman Brothers worked out the process of repurchasing assets and counting them as sales. "'So it's legally doable but doesn't look good when we actually do it? Does the rest of the street do it?' one Lehman employee asks another in emails included in the report. The answers, respectively, are yes and no, followed by a smiley face." CONFIDENCE-INSPIRING.
Flowers of Evil
It's a funny thing, fidelity. Last week's enormous bankruptcy-report filing on shady financial practices at the late Lehman Brothers investment house depicts an internal braintrust desperate to conceal reckless debt transactions and deceptive accounting practices from public view. The court-appointed examiner in the firm's bankruptcy proceedings, Anton Valukas, found that senior Lehman officials tried to alert their bosses of blatant efforts to reclassify debt as "sales" under a recondite accounting trick known in house as "Repo 105"-so named because it permitted the company to assess buy-back transactions of assets sold for cash at a value representing 105% or more of the cash the company actually pulled in. And presto, Valukas observes: "Unbeknownst to the investing public, rating agencies, Government regulators, and Lehman's Board of Directors, Lehman reverse engineered the firm's net leverage ratio for public consumption." READ MORE
Lehman Brothers Auction is Awesome Home Shopping
The Wall Street Journal turns up its nose at the forthcoming auction of the art collection of Lehman Brothers, which is going up for sale on Sunday. "Many of the works are by unknowns, meant primarily to decorate wall space," says the WSJ. Sure, it's not exactly a world-class collection by any stretch-but also it's not at all a bad group of artists, or "unknowns." And most of the works seem to be prints, so of course this is by no means a big bucks auction. But a Julie Mehretu print for five grand? A recent Ed Ruscha for a grand? A 1975 Calder print for $1200??? This is like fun bargain basement shopping-with actual investment potential. You snobs!
