Andrew Sorkin - Too Big to Fail - The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the FinancialSystem--and Themselves

“Isn’t twenty percent of something better than one hundred percent of nothing?”

The room fell silent.

As the meeting wore on, Willumstad checked his watch, knowing that he owed Paulson and Geithner an answer quickly.

“Let’s go around the table and let everybody say what you think we should do,” Willumstad instructed. “To be honest with you, I urge you to vote in favor of the Fed proposal,” he told them, starting off. “We have three constituents. Shareholders, customers, employees. This is not something that’s friendly to the shareholders, but it will preserve the customers, keep the company afloat, and you have a better chance these people will keep their jobs.”

As they made their way around the table, all the board members voted in favor of the government deal with the exception of Stephen Bollenbach, the former chief executive of Hilton Hotels. Bollenbach, who was supported by Eli Broad and other major dissident AIG shareholders, had joined the board in January. He thought that a proper judge would give shareholders a fairer deal.

Before the vote was formally tallied, Bollenbach asked a question: Was there any room to renegotiate the terms of the deal?

Willumstad and the lawyers retreated to his office to call Geithner.

“Tim, Dick and Rodge are here,” Willumstad said. “It’s probably appropriate to let me have Dick explain to you the directors’ feelings.”

Leaning in toward the speakerphone, Beattie said, “Tim, the board wants to know whether the terms can be renegotiated. They think eighty percent is outrageous.”

“Terms cannot be negotiated,” Geithner said firmly. “These are the only terms you’re going to get.”

As the three men looked at each other resignedly, Beattie continued, “We have a second question. The board wants to know whether, if the company can come up with its own financing to take the Fed’s place, would that be acceptable?”

Geithner hesitated and then replied: “Nobody would be happier than I if the company, you know, would pay the Fed back.”

Beattie returned to the boardroom and relayed the conversation. The deal was done.

Paulson and Bernanke, after finishing with the president, ran over to the Hill to brief key congressmen, who were none too pleased with the AIG bailout news. Senate majority leader Harry Reid hosted the meeting in his second-floor conference room. The gathering had been hastily organized; some congressmen were invited only twenty minutes before it began. Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, was supposed to be at a black-tie dinner and showed up in his tuxedo, sans tie. Barney Frank arrived late in an untucked shirt.

Paulson and Bernanke explained why they thought their decision had been a necessary one. “If we don’t do this,” Paulson told them, the impact of an AIG bankruptcy would “be felt across America and around the world.”

Frank, concerned about the cost, looked at Bernanke. “Do you have $80 billion?”

With a barely concealed smile, Bernanke answered, “Well, we have $800 billion.”

Back at JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon and Jimmy Lee were sitting in Dimon’s office when the AIG press release came across the tape. “They’re never going to get their money back,” Lee told Dimon. “There’s no way.”

“I guarantee you they’ll get more than $50 billion of it back,” Dimon shot back, thinking that Washington had just cut itself a good deal, however bad it was from a public relations perspective. “AIG has a lot of good insurance businesses it can auction off. You’ll see.”

Dimon and Lee placed a $10 bet on who would turn out to be right.

Around 11:00 that night, Bob Willumstad’s driver pulled up to his building on Park Avenue, just across from Lenox Hill Hospital. Dashing under its green awning, Willumstad, tired and depressed, rode up the elevator to his seventh-floor apartment. Pacing in his kitchen, he recounted the day’s events to his wife, Carol.

Before turning in for bed, Willumstad checked his BlackBerry one last time. David Herzog, the company’s controller and a man who had been working behind the scenes nonstop for the past weekend to keep the firm afloat, had sent him an e-mail. The time stamp was 11:54 p.m.; the subject line, “Last Steps”:

Thank you for taking on this very difficult challenge. The events that unfolded tonight were set in motion long ago.

Before you leave office, I ask only one thing. Please clean the slate for Mr. Liddy. I urge the following dismissals immediately:

Schreiber

Lewis & McGinn

Nueger & Scott

Bensinger

Kelly

Kaslow

Dooley

While this may seem a bit harsh, this group of executives each have shown in their own ways a clear pattern of ineptness that contributed to the destruction of one of America’s greatest companies. Please, don’t make Mr. Liddy figure this out on his own.

I mean no disrespect to these individuals, but the 120,000 employees around the world deserve better, and some sense of accountability for what just happened.

We need leadership, and these individuals are simply not leaders.

Respectfully yours,

David

Willumstad, standing in the hallway in his boxer shorts, just shook his head in disbelief.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

When Tim Geithner began his run on Wednesday morning along the southern tip of Manhattan and up the East River just after 6:00, the sun had yet to come up. He was tired and stressed, having slept only several hours in one of the three tiny, grubby bedrooms in the New York Fed’s headquarters.

As he stared at the Statue of Liberty and the first of the morning’s commuter ferries from Staten Island gliding across the harbor, he tried desperately to clear his mind. For five days his brain had been trapped in a maze of numbers—huge, inconceivable, abstract numbers, ranging in the span of twenty-four hours from zero for Lehman to $85 billion for AIG. Eighty-five billion dollars was more than the annual budgets of Singapore and Taiwan combined; who could even begin to understand a figure of that size? Geithner hoped the sum was sufficient—and that the crisis would finally be over.

Those ferries, freighted with office workers, gave him pause. This is what it is all about, he thought to himself, the people who rise at dawn to get in to their jobs, all of whom rely to some extent on the financial industry to help power the economy. Never mind the staggering numbers. Never mind the ruthless complexity of structured finance and derivatives, nor the million-dollar bonuses of those who made bad bets. This is what saving the financial industry is really about, he reminded himself , protecting ordinary people with ordinary jobs.

But as he passed the South Street Seaport and then under the Brooklyn Bridge, he had inadvertently begun thinking about what fresh hell the day would bring. He was most anxious about the latest shocking development: A giant money market fund, Reserve Primary Fund, had broken the buck a day earlier (which meant that the value of the fund’s assets had fallen to below a dollar per share—in this case, 97 cents). Money market funds were never supposed to do that; they were one of the least risky investments available, providing investors with minuscule returns in exchange for total security. But the Reserve Primary Fund had chased a higher yield—a 4.04 percent annual return, the highest in the industry—by making risky bets, including $785 million in Lehman paper. Investors had started liquidating their accounts, which in turn forced managers to impose a seven-day moratorium on redemptions. Nobody, Geithner worried, knew just how extensive the damage could end up being.