COLLAPSED investment bank Lehman Brothers had been “blindsided”, the former managing director of its investment management division told a conference of students in Tralee, Co Kerry, yesterday.
“It bought too many properties . . . This would have been okay in a normal environment,” Michael Brewster said.
Everyone on Wall Street was “rolling the dice too much”, the 40-year old Longford native said in the course of an onstage interview with broadcaster and seminar moderator Colette Fitzpatrick.
Mr Brewster has since moved with his team to rival bank Credit Suisse.
However, the frenetic pace of recent events was evident in his presentation to 600 young entrepreneurs, entitled “How I made my Wall Street dream come true”.
It began with a video clip of Lehman Brothers and the logo “Delivering our firm to clients worldwide”.
The programme literature also billed him as working with Lehman Brothers, founded in 1850, “managing investments for high net-worth and institutional clients”.
“When I see the video it makes me very nostalgic,” Mr Brewster said at the start of the interview. He had been with Lehman Brothers for 16 years.
If you buy millions of properties, houses, land banks and then the value collapses, “all of a sudden it’s meltdown”, he explained to the audience.
Mr Brewster, who is now a senior manager with Credit Suisse in New York, had left Ireland when there was “20 per cent unemployment”.
Mr Brewster urged the students to “focus on a goal . . . make sure you pursue it every day”.
He said that when faced with decisions, people should trust their instincts.
Even the smartest people in the world got things wrong. One year ago “everyone said buy property”. In 2005, Alan Greenspan former chairman of the Federal Reserve was saying everyone should be buying property because it hadn’t gone down in 75 years, Mr Brewster said. “The minute he did, it went down.”
Stressing it was important to have a balance between work, family and friends, he also suggested that young people could afford to fail a number of times, encouraging them to follow their ideas and their dreams.
