INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
By Shuli RenOn a Sunday night 10 years ago, I was sitting alone in my midtown Manhattan apartment on 46th Street, preparing to dial into
a conference call to discuss the impending demise of my employer: Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc
14, it had become widely accepted that Lehman would go into bankruptcy
Farewell and personal-contact emails started to stream in from colleagues
I wondered whether we would be able to return to work Monday
The call was like a tall glass of Kool-Aid
We could also market our group and perhaps find a new home
I drank with gusto.
I, and probably many others, thought there was no way Lehman would be liquidated, and that my quantitative equity
research group would be all right.
Sure, Lehman held toxic assets
They must be of some value
It was eerily quiet at 745 Seventh Avenue
Once out, we could be staring at years of unemployment, fighting with multitudes for a handful of openings.
During the ensuing month, things
almost started to look up
We chatted with a few hedge funds and even met with my current employer, Bloomberg LP, which was just starting to develop in-house credit
research tools.
The real crash for me came on a bleak October Friday afternoon
Our managing director was fired and we all knew our Enterprise Valuation Group was done
I started sending out my resume
Looking back, the writing was all over the wall
Our group was overly ambitious, deploying our research for prop trading as well as trying to sell to third parties
Barclays had no appetite for this oddball hybrid; all it saw was a cost center
But having developed so much camaraderie with colleagues, we were too emotionally involved and it was hard to see clearly what was
happening.
When I left Barclays in February 2009, it felt like the end of the world
Ten years on, the United States stock market is having a record bull run
beautifully in a market that has since handed out $7 trillion in dividends and buybacks
Our group was ahead of its time
Afterwards, whenever my employer announced a restructuring, my first instinct was to calculate how much time I had before getting the boot
But the bankruptcy also teased me out of my comfort zone and gave me a taste for adventure
Seven years ago, I switched careers, moved continents, and now am happily writing columns about crazy rich Asians.
(This column does not
necessarily reflect the opinion of economictimes.com, Bloomberg and its owners)
