![]() ![]() The plastic address sign that sat outside Madoff’s Montauk beach house went for $2,000, and the plastic duck decoys once used to attract birds that he could shoot for sport were sold for $11,500.Īs the day traders of the Wall Street Bets Reddit forum like to joke: buy high, sell low. One schmuck spent $14,500 on a Mets baseball jacket emblazoned with the Ponzi schemer’s name on the back, and another forked out $1,000 on crummy boogie boards with “MADOFF” scrawled on them in black marker pen. When the US Marshals auctioned off Bernie Madoff’s possessions back in 2009, customers inexplicably sank a total of $900,000 on his old crap. “There’s definitely an element of trolling here as well – why else would you wear Madoff merch?” “There’s definitely an element of trolling here as well."ĭown is right to ask the question. “These guys who wear Lehman or Salomon caps probably wish they worked in an era where their job was more of a ‘fuck you pay me’ than a ‘he works in finance, how lame’,” Down tells me. Mickey Down, co-creator of Industry, the smash hit TV series about the young hires navigating the grad scheme of a ruthless London investment bank, says the appeal of financial crash chic is in recalling a time when it was “actually cool to be a banker”. ![]() Should availability always denote value? What would you want, say, with Shakespeare’s old wooden chamberpot, or the rags that Henry VIII used to wipe his arse with? But try telling that to the young financiers bidding for this vainglorious tat. It would be easy to think that this is exactly what it sounds like, which is junk that even a hoarder would chuck straight in the bin. ![]() There’s also endless offers of expensive kit from Bear Stearns, like an old café swipe card ( £28) and a promotional stuffed bear toy ( £491). True Lehman-heads might also enjoy purchasing their 2004 annual report ( £63), fixed income product brochures ( £45), health and safety policy statements ( £13), emergency evacuation packs with goggles and face masks ( £70), and if they were so inclined, a letter signed by a former senior vice president named Edward McGlynn from 1982 ( £303). So much so that old promotional gear – what Brits call ‘stash’ and Americans ‘swag – from these companies currently changes hands for hundreds of pounds.Īt the time of writing, and assuming these are all genuine, traders on eBay were flogging Lehman baseball caps ( £40), gym bags ( £190), fleeces ( £76), ring binders ( £55), golf shoe bags ( £33), keyring torches ( £13), pens ( £20), coffee pots ( £20), beach towels ( £281) and leather wine cases ( £705). And yet for the young kings and queens of Wall Street and London’s Square Mile, these deceased, disgraced institutions have become, somehow, chic. Madoff Investment Securities - and any other firms that were eaten up in the financial crisis, victims of their own folly. This is the type of scene that most readers conjure up when reminded of the names Lehman, Bear Stearns, Bernard L. It was seven years before he appeared in public again. What a comedown for Fuld, whose swaggering presence among the C-suite earned him the nom de guerre “The Gorilla”. His tongue schlurped out when he was quizzed about his oceanfront home in Florida his summer vacation pile in Sun Valley, Idaho his multimillion-dollar art collection and the fact that the former president of Lehman, Joe Gregory, commuted to work by helicopter. Ignoble 500!īankers have long been connoted with cold-blooded animals in the class reptilia, but biologists would have recognised something decidedly herpetological about the way Fuld’s tongue kept darting out of his mouth to moisten his lips and the way he craned his neck up, ready to squirm away from legislative predators before they ate him. It was October 2008 - and watching it now, Fuld reads as a pinstriped, blundering commander of the Light Brigade, charging the planet into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell. There’s an old clip online of Richard Fuld, the chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers, explaining to the US government why he earned $500 million during the years he led his company to disaster. ![]()
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