Affordable Housing Institute : US

By: David A. Smith

 

O the Wild Geese are flying, O the Wild Geese are flying.

We’ve built your canals and railroads, our buildings reach the sky

– “The Wild Geese,” by Mike Harding

 

In 1691, after the Williamite Army crushed the Irish Jacobite army in the Battle of the Boyne, their army was allowed to disperse.  They took to the continent, serving initially in the French Army.

 

[New York Times, September 13, 2009]  Tom Ollquist remembers Sept. 9, 2008 — the day Lehman Brothers laid him off — as if it were yesterday. “You’re not going to believe it,” he told his wife. “I was shot.”

 

“Tom Ollquist sold packages of mortgages and other financial products for Lehman Brothers.”

 

Six days later, so was Lehman Brothers. Federal regulators let the foundering firm slip into bankruptcy, a collapse that touched off the most perilous week of the financial debacle, after years of freewheeling lending, trading and regulation produced outsize losses that devastated the banking system and brought the economy to its knees.

 

So began a military diaspora that continued for more than two centuries, the Flight of the Wild Geese:

 

The term “Wild Geese” is used in Irish history to refer to Irish soldiers who left to serve in continental European armies in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, or even, poetically, Irish soldiers in British armies as late as the First World War.

 

Lehman’s traders, bankers, and salespeople have been exploded across the financial landscape. 

 

Blasted into our organizational parts

 

Defined by their jobs, they are now defined by what they were, as the Wild Geese were defined not by where they found themselves, but where they wished themselves to be.

 

The eternal salesman

 

In some ways, daily life seems barely different for Mr. Ollquist. He’s back doing what he has done for a quarter-century: selling.  His train from Long Island leaves 11 minutes later than his old one. The trading floor still hums. His mascot — a stuffed moose — still looks down as he works the phones. And weekends are free for golf at the Hempstead Golf and Country Club.

 

Attention must be paid to such a man

 

A salesman’s smile appears when he is asked about his regrets. He’s 45 and had hoped to retire at 50 to become a coach. That will have to wait a bit.

 

People close to him sense a sadness in Mr. Ollquist.  

 

Wouldn’t you feel that way?  With your emotional worth tied into a particular firm?

 

He lost his job, his savings, and his dreams of kicking back and retiring soon to become a high school basketball coach.

 

Proximity to England meant that Ireland could represent a convenient inner colony, an economic and social servitude under which Ireland chafed. 

 

Fought wars for a stranger’s cause and on foreign fields we’ve died

Like the Wild Geese we’ve been flying cross the restless waves

 

Only when the bigger country was distracted or bled white by war could the Irish rise up: in 1690 after England’s Glorious Revolution;, in 1715 after the War of Spanish Succession; in 1745 during the War of Austrian Succession; in 1798 with Britain fighting revolutionary France; in 1916 with the Easter Rising; and finally, Irish independence in 1922.

 

“I have blood on my hands,” Mr. Ollquist acknowledges, fiddling with several bracelets he wears, each with its own sentimental story –  

 

Nostalgia is a common emotional refuge for those whose lives have been blasted.  So is self-exculpation:

 

– before he quickly ticks off a list of other parties he thinks are even more culpable than salesmen like him for the meltdown: regulators, senior executives, rival firms and traders who believed their elaborate computer algorithms insulated them from risk.

 

As I’ve previously posted, it was so easy to believe in risk management’s perpetual-motion machine.

 

 “It is very human and understandable to feel the pressure of the time and respond accordingly,” says Karen Brenner, a professor of business ethics and corporate governance at New York University.  

 

Brenner says she would have examined what she did,

 

“These people were operating in a culture where this behavior was prized and rewarded. But I think it is too easy to say, ‘They made me do it; I don’t have to examine what I did.’ These people are professionals with duties and obligations to clients.”

 

It’s easy now to say that the individuals had professional duties and obligations.  It’s easy now to say that we would not have been tempted.  It’s easy now to say that we would not have succumbed to those pressures. 

 

Irish regiments were prized for their fighting qualities:

 

Irish recruitment for continental armies dried up after it was made illegal in 1745. In 1732 Sir Charles Wogan indicated in a letter to Dean Swift that 120,000 Irishmen had been killed and wounded in foreign service “within these forty years”, with Swift later replying: “I cannot but highly esteem those gentlemen of Ireland who, with all the disadvantages of being exiles and strangers, have been able to distinguish themselves by their valour and conduct in so many parts of Europe, I think, above all other nations.”

 

Now, about that child overpopulation problem …

 

As he wrestles with his conscience, Mr. Ollquist is just one among legions of former Wall Streeters who continue to move past, adapt to or struggle with an event that has been a personal and professional watershed for all of them.

 

For finance’s wild geese, it’s not what you made.  It’s what you did with what you made, and what you learned during the boom and after the bust.

 

The Lehman crew drank together, exercised together, vacationed together, dated one another, and kept constantly in touch day and night as they traded market information, gossip, and the ins and out of their personal lives. Once bound by the financial promise of their company stock, as well as a shared sense of professional purpose, they are now scattered far and wide, many of them tethered to parts of the banking industry that have survived or are regenerating.

 

 

And often at times it’s lonely, we wish ourselves back home

Amongst your friends and family, no longer forth to roam

 

 

As they disperse, finance’s wild geese reveal themselves.

 

The walking wounded

 

When we’re wounded, we lean on each other

 

For Leslee Gelber, there is no doubt: life is getting harder by the day. Her fortunes twisted later than others who lost their jobs before Lehman collapsed.

 

“Leslee Gelber has been at loose ends since losing her job.”

 

Last year at this time, in fact, Ms. Gelber felt like a winner. She was one of three survivors in a banking unit that had laid off 22 people in 10 months. Forty-three years old and single, she had made it in a male-dominated world, often taking on much larger workloads than her peers.

She thought Lehman would make it, and so would she. “We felt like we were lucky to have survived,” she recalls.

 

But on the morning of the bankruptcy filing, her life fell apart. Walking into work, she turned to an Associated Press reporter and said what many of her colleagues feared: I’ve got no job prospects. Her words were blasted everywhere, even in newspapers in her native Montreal.

 

In the world of Google, you are known by your quotable, even if what is quotable is not what you want quoted.

 

She immediately threw herself into the job hunt, blasting scores of resumes to employers and government agencies like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.  Almost no one called. Her business — the purchasing of mortgages to bundle — is still moribund. Though she wants to stay in New York, she is applying to jobs across the country, hoping she will catch someone’s eye. She’s open to change, but she has found that no one wants talk with her about jobs outside her area of expertise. She says she is still optimistic that the mortgage markets will rebound.

 

The gym has become Ms. Gelber’s haven. She takes a spinning class and goes running. It helps keep her sane, she says.

 

The hardest part is all the downtime, she says. When she’s not in classes or at the gym, she’s in her apartment surfing the Web for jobs. She has forgone any big vacations this year because she says she “won’t enjoy it, knowing I don’t have a job.”

 

She needs to start a business.  The only person who will employ her is herself.

 

If you start me up I’ll never stop

 

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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