The corridors of power

The speech Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld should have given at House of
Representative’s Oversight Committee meeting held on Capitol Hill, September 2008

Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious by that son of a bitch, Greed, and all the cash that lour’d upon world banks in the deep bosom of banker’s pockets buried.
Now are our brows bound with defeat, our bruised stock markets hung up for monuments, our merry meetings turned to stern alarums, our dreadful incompetence turned to inadequate measures.

Grim visaged investors have smoothed their wrinkled accounts and instead of sitting tight have mounted barbed steeds in flight of those fearful souls of their adversaries.
Who capers nimbly to the lascivious pleasing of depositors? Not I – that am not shaped for such sportive tricks nor made to court a looking glass. I – that was rudely stamped and sought householder’s homes, strutting before a wanton marketplace. I – that am finally curtailed of embezzlement by bankruptcy, cheating by dissembling nature, selling deformed mortgages scarce half made up, unfinished and repossessed before their time in this financial fiasco.
And so lamely and unfashionable that investors now bark at me as I halt by them . Why I, in this weak piping time of greed, have no delight to pass away unless to spy my deception and descant on its deformity?

And therefore, since I cannot prove my innocence I am determined to prove a villain and love the easy money of these days. Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, by fraudulent prophecies, libels and dreams, to set my brother banker against his brother investor in deadly hate, the one against the other.

About a prophecy which said that crash the outcome will be.

Dive Richard, thoughts down to my soul.

Here the House of Representatives Investigation Committee will see.

LS,
Nicosia