Obituaries for Lehman Bros appearing…

Obituaries for Lehman Brothers have started rolling out. Here’s one:

Bloomberg.com: Special Report

Fuld’s Subprime Bets Fueled Lehman Profits, Undermined Survival
By Peter Robison and Yalman Onaran

Sept. 15 (Bloomberg) — Richard Fuld, a one-time international squash player accustomed to playing the angles, finally found one he couldn’t master.

The longest-serving chief executive officer on Wall Street battled for more than a year to contain the fallout from Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s bad bets on real estate. His defense of the 158-year-old firm ended yesterday when Barclays Plc and Bank of America Corp. walked away from buyout talks, leaving a bankruptcy filing as his only option.

Over 14 years, Fuld, 62, turned a money-losing bond trading shop into a full-service investment bank. He won acclaim from Wall Street leaders such as Lazard Ltd. chief Bruce Wasserstein, who on June 4 called him “very able.” Fuld joined the circle of CEOs sought-after by boards, such as the New York Federal Reserve’s. Fuld ultimately gambled almost four times the firm’s shareholder equity last year on mortgage securities that he insisted were hedged by other bets.

“It makes me rather sad to see this organization brought to its knees as the result of what I’ll call a lack of control, poor management of internal risk and ultimate self-interest,” said Walter Gerasimowicz, who worked at Lehman as an investment strategist and now heads Meditron Asset Management in New York. His firm manages $1 billion and doesn’t own any Lehman shares.

The apparent upcoming death of LEH also saddens me. LEH holds a special place in my memory for being the only investment bank to give me a non-tech job interview in 1999. I still remember the grilling they gave me in a series of hotel rooms (the kinds with beds, not conference) at the Marriott World Trade Center. I didn’t think that in my lifetime, I’d have read the obits for both.