WASHINGTON — The now-bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers arranged millions in bonuses for fired executives as it pleaded for a federal lifeline, lawmakers learned Monday, as Congress began investigating what went so wrong on Wall Street to prompt a $700 billion government bailout.
The first in a series of congressional hearings on the roots of the financial meltdown yielded few major revelations about Lehman’s collapse, and none about why government officials, as they scrambled to avert economic catastrophe, declined to rescue the flagging company while injecting tens of billions of dollars into others.
But it allowed lawmakers still smarting from a politically painful vote Friday for the largest federal market rescue in history to put a face on their outrage at corporate chieftains who took home hundreds of millions of dollars while betting on risky mortgage-backed investments that ultimately brought the financial system to its knees.
That face was Richard S. Fuld Jr., the Lehman chief executive who sat for a two-hour-plus grilling before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee as the panel combed through his pay history, management practices and financial strategies.
“You made all this money by taking risks with other people’s money,” Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the panel’s chairman, said.
“The system worked for you, but it didn’t seem to work for the rest of the country and the taxpayers, who now have to pay $700 billion to bail out our economy.”
A subdued Fuld opened his testimony by declaring, “I take full responsibility for the decisions that I made and for the actions that I took,” but he conceded no errors or misjudgments in the chaotic period that led to the firm’s bankruptcy.
And he said a compensation system that he estimated paid him about $350 million between 2000 and 2007 even as the company headed for disaster was appropriate.
That wasn’t good enough for some lawmakers, who decried what they called a culture of entitlement at Lehman even as the company’s performance nose-dived.
The panel unearthed internal documents showing that on Sept. 11, Lehman planned to approve “special payments” worth $18.2 million for two executives who were terminated involuntarily, and another $5 million for one who was leaving on his own.
Fuld said Lehman did everything it could to limit its risks and save itself. It failed, he said, because of a “crisis in confidence” on Wall Street, market manipulation in which investors preyed on distressed financial players by betting on their demise, and would-be buyers who waited for the government to step in to help fund a sale.
“In the end, despite all of our efforts, we were overwhelmed,” Fuld said, looking uncomfortable seated by himself at a witness table where he fiddled with a pencil and removed and donned his glasses habitually as he fielded at-times angry questions.
