Richard Fuld

Richard Fuld served as CEO of Lehman Brothers from 1994 until its bankruptcy in September 2008. Under his leadership, Lehman grew aggressively into real estate, leveraged loans, and complex structured products, building leverage ratios of 30-to-1 or higher. When real estate markets collapsed, Lehman's exposure proved fatal. Fuld's refusal to sell the firm at prices he considered below fair value, and the government's decision not to orchestrate a rescue as it had for Bear Stearns, resulted in the largest bankruptcy in US history — $613 billion. Fuld became a symbol of pre-crisis executive excess. The Lehman collapse set off a cascade of financial market disruptions including the seizing of money market funds, the collapse of commercial paper markets, and a global credit freeze that required unprecedented central bank intervention across the US, Europe, and Asia to prevent a complete breakdown of the international financial system.