What Does the Collapse of Lehman Brothers Say About the Culture of Wall Street?

People who work on Wall Street are different than the other part of the world workforce. They usually have graduated the top business and economics schools in the world and have the self-confidence of people who have the whole globe in their hands. Well this is not far from the truth, because Wall Street controls the money flow around the world. Those people decide on the lives of thousands of people, by making them rich or poor for a second.

The work on Wall Street is different and risky. Investment bankers earn a lot of money and at the same time, their tomorrow's position is not clear. The culture of Wall Street is connected with severe competition for better investment decisions. Thus the human factor is lowered to minimum. 40,000 AT&T workers lost their job. This sounds like terrible news. But the stock market applauded it, sending AT&T shares up . Investment bankers represent a totally different culture of work ethics and behaviour. The bonus culture of Wall Street could be synonymous to greed. Most of the bankers are motivated mainly by the bonuses they earn. The business world has moved from the importance of the needs of all the stakeholders only to the needs of the shareholders.

Lehman Brothers was founded in 1980 by Henry Lehman and his brothers, Emanuel and Mayer. Although Lehman faced a lot of difficulties it became on of the fourth biggest investment banks in USA. It survived the great depression in 1930 and many other challenging moments of the world economic history, but the collapse of the USA house market was the Achilles' heel of the bank. Lehman's brothers bankruptcy was one of the largest in the history, with assets equal to $639 billion and debt of $619 billion .It left 25 000 employees out of work and fueled the span of the world economic crisis.

The connection between the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the culture of Wall Street is obvious. The greed