Who knew that old creditors get paid after lawyers? According to law professor Lynn LoPucki who spoke to the Daily News about corporate bankruptcies, "The lawyers and all the other professionals who work on the case get paid first. The system deliberately makes the old creditors wait - sometimes for two or three years - while payday for the new creditors comes once a month." So while the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers is selling off assets......

C is for many things, include chutzpah: A man who was fired for calling another broker the c-word is suing his old boss for $50 million. Kai Kemnitz, who was hired from Deutsche Bank in 2006 for $2.7 million a year was sacked in 2007 after the incident. According to Bloomberg News, the word was uttered during a "high stress trade": He was mad the broker didn't have a buyer for some Wachovia options, forcing......

Photograph of Code Pink activists heckling Fuld as he heads to Congress by Susan Walsh/AP Richard "Dick" Fuld, the CEO who led the once-storied Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy, was defensive when questioned by the House Oversight Committee yesterday. The NY Times reports he "blamed the news media. He blamed the short-sellers. He blamed the government, as well as what he characterized as an 'extraordinary run on the bank.'" but "never really blamed himself." Fuld......

The NY Post reports on the overall unfairness of former Lehman Brothers employees' severance being cut off, while "former Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld received a total compensation package of $71.9 million last year." Though a former employee--who was laid off in March after 16 years with the firm--had signed a severance agreement giving her pay and health insurance through April 2009, she received a letter last month saying it was ending because of the......

After talk that Barclays would keep many Lehman Brothers employees on after buying the bankrupt firm's broker-dealer business, the AP reports the British firm "announced Monday that Lehman Brothers has begun to re-open for business under the ownership of Barclays Capital." However, according to the Post, "about 10,000 Lehman employees of the units that Barclays is buying were sent letters stating there will be no guarantees they will keep their jobs" and many are being......

Now that Barclays is buying Lehman Brothers' broker-dealer business, the British firm is also getting Lehman's Seventh Avenue headquarters. The NY Times has a great story following the building's history: It was originally built for Morgan Stanley, but MS decided back out before it was finished and Lehman bought the building four weeks after the 9/11 attacks. The Partnership for NYC's Kathryn Wilde said, “Barclays has had a rather modest presence here, so this is......

The faltering economy and the fall of Wall Street banks has turned city leaders into counselors trying to calm New Yorkers down, given the huge impact of those businesses on the city. Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg commented about Barclays buying Lehman Brothers' broker-dealer business, pointing out how he said NYC was prepared to deal with these events:"Today's agreement demonstrates how the ideas, skills, and enterprise of our City's workforce offer world-class value that is more lasting......

Last night, the federal government gave insurer AIG a new lease on life with an $85 billion loan--in exchange for a 79.9% stake in the company. The NY Times reports, "The decision, only two weeks after the Treasury took over the federally chartered mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is the most radical intervention in private business in the central bank’s history." As the Wall Street Journal noted, the Fed decided not......

Photograph by labatata on Flickr The fallout from Lehman Brothers' self-destruction meant employees spent the weekend and yesterday packing up their things and working on their resumes. The NY Times reported that the trading floor was a third empty and the "bankers’ dress code was mostly out: while a few holdouts kept their ties knotted firmly, most of the traders moved around in jeans, casual shirts, even sneakers. One young employee showed up in......

As speculated earlier this morning, U.K-based Barclays has reached an agreement to acquire a large chunk of Lehman Brothers' U.S. operations, which, according to the Financial Times, "perform securities underwriting tasks, provide merger advice to lucrative clients, and conduct trading." Though the cost of the deal is unclear, it's expected to quickly boost Barclays' U.S. presence by enabling the bank to assemble a pre-existing American investment banking business. As for the tainted Lehman Brothers assets,......

After the Dow Jones industrial average fell 504 points--the most since September 17, 2001--yesterday upon news of Lehman Brothers's bankruptcy, the sale of Merrill Lynch, and A.I.G.'s troubles, Wall Street is in for another difficult day. Asian stock markets were down sharply: Tokyo's Nikkei was down 5%, Seoul's Kospi was down 6.1% and Hong Kong's Hang Seng fell 5.9%. The Wall Street Journal reported, "Steps unveiled by the Federal Reserve to expand its emergency......

The Dow Jones industrial average lost over 500 points today, the biggest one-day decline for the Dow since Sept. 17, 2001, when the market reopened for trading after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "You have to throw out the history books because there's really nothing to compare this to," Jim Dunigan, chief investment officer at PNC Advisors, tells CNN. Stephen Leeb, president at Leeb Capital Management, says, "People are panicked but it's not the end of......

There's a coffee cart man who has declared (via a sign on his cart) that he will not serve coffee to those reporting on the Lehman Brothers (ahem, WSJ). Now Dealbreaker has gone to the caffeine source, named Leon, to get the real deal on his declaration of solidarity. The coffee purveyor told them, "When they suffer I suffer," and that he "thinks the bankruptcy filing 'sucks, but what can you do?'" He also noted......

Reuters/NY Times In the first ten minutes of trading this morning, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped more than 300 points, while the major European stock exchanges sank more than 4 percent, the Times is reporting. What color is your parachute? The nosedive is the unsurprising result of several days of increasingly bad news from investment bank Lehman Brothers, which announced its bankruptcy filing after 158 years in business. Today is the first day of......

The financial industry's worst weekend ended on these notes: Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, after being unable to find a buyer; Bank of America, previously interested in Lehman Brothers (but didn't want to buy it with government protection) decided to buy Merrill Lynch for $50 billion; and it's worried AIG and Washington Mutual will fall next. The financial markets are expected to be in tumultuous territory, and a banking analyst told USA Today, "We are in a hysteria."...

The fate of Lehman Brothers is still to be determined, as the Wall Street Journal reports that it has become "increasingly clear that a clean sale of the entire firm to a big bank would be too difficult to execute." More "high-level talks were held Saturday" --including participants like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who doesn't want the government to bail out the bank a la Bear Stearns. One possibility: Lehman might be sold in pieces.......

Last night, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York "held an emergency meeting" between heads of Wall Street banks and officials including Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, NY Fed President Timothy Geithner, and SEC Chairman Christopher Cox. The officials want a plan to discuss the faltering markets as it continues to batter financial institutions, and, per the NY TImes, "Geithner told the participants that an industry solution was needed, no matter what, and that it was......

The headline from CNBC: Lehman Unlikely to Remain Independent Much Longer. The headline from Washington Post: U.S. Government to Assist in Sale of Lehman Brothers ("Treasury Department and Federal Reserve to help investment bank put itself up for sale. Sources familiar with matter say purchase is expected to be announced this weekend."). Subheadline from the Wall Street Journal: Bank of America is Among Interested But Seeks Assurances. Lehman's shares dropped 45% in today's trading.......

After its shares fell amid news it failed to get a strategic investment--and pushed the Dow Jones 280 points lower--yesterday, Lehman Brothers said it lost almost $4 billion during the third quarter. Per CNN Money, "It was Lehman's biggest quarterly loss since the firm went public in 1994, exceeding a $2.8 billion loss announced in June," (analysts were expecting a $1.99 billion loss). The investment bank is planning a major restructuring, spinning off most of......

Today, Lehman Brothers' shares fell as, per the NY Times, "reports that Lehman’s efforts to secure a strategic investment from Korea Development Bank...had failed." That sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average 280 points lower. And in other Wall Street news, an analyst believes that there will be many more layoffs to come. Crain's reports that Meredith Whitney of Oppenheimer believes there will be a bigger lay off rush than the dot-com bubble, "The slowdown in......

Different media outlets report that investment bank Lehman Brothers will cut anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 jobs, about 5-6% of its 26,200 workforce. Dealbreaker reports that there have been rumors of layoffs for the past few weeks, and, per Bloomberg, "Lehmanites will hold on to their jobs for a little longer, at least until Lehman announces its third-quarter financial results." Lehman has already cut 4,000 jobs this year. Earlier this week, the NY Times' Andrew......

The financial markets may be taking a hit lately, but Wall Street is still planning about $38 billion in bonuses this year. Bloomberg News reports that the money was thanks to "a record $9 billion of fees for arranging acquisitions and $5 billion for underwriting initial public offerings and sales of junk bonds." This translate to an average Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns worker getting over $200,000 in bonuses.......

A junior trader at one of the world's largest hedge funds, SAC Capital, is suing the company. Andrew Tong alleges that his boss Ping Jiang––the two men are 37 and 41 years old, respectively––forced him to take estrogen hormone pills and wear a dress to work. This was supposedly to feminize him and make him a better trader. Tong also alleges that he was sexually assaulted while at work. If this is the first you've......

With the economy acting as though it's on a roller coaster given concerns about credit and mortgage markets, NYC real estate brokers are feeling the pains. Some potential buyers who would have qualified before issues with the mortgage markets now find themselves struggling to get the loans they need and being asked to put more of their money down. However, we will say it's hard to be sympathetic to someone looking for a $3.3......

Yesterday, it was announced Tishman-Speyer, the real estate firm that bought Stuyvesant Town for $5.4 billion, along with Lehman Brothers would buy real estate investment trust Archstone Smith in a $22.2 billion deal; the Observer calls it the "largest public-to-private acquisition ever among apartment REIT’s." Archstone Smith has over over 85,000 rentals nationally and almost 3,800 in NYC, which would given Tishman-Speyer over 15,000 apartments for its portfolio. According to Crain's, there's been more interest......

Breaking: Tishman-Speyer, the real estate concern that controls Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building, the Lipstick Building, and much more around the city and world, was the winning bidder in the Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village sweepstakes. The NY Times' Charles Bagli writes: Mr. Speyer and his partner, the Blackrock investment bank, outmaneuvered nearly a dozen bidders, including a group aligned with the tenants at the complexes who hoped to preserve what is fast becoming a......