Lehman’s Q3 net falls less than expected.

Todd’s interview with Geoff Cutmore at CNBC’s Squawk Box Sept 2007

Host: Let’s get to Hong Kong, Todd Everts, he’s the CEO of Wall Street Global…Todd, you are looking very closely at what these banks are telling us at this point. How confident can we feel that Lehmans is on the mark both with its numbers at this point and the message?

Todd: Well, the message that they’re putting out is obviously the one that they want to be on their favor based on their stock price. The issues that face us going forward are the further fallout from the sub prime crisis. I mean if we look at these borrowers, may of these borrowers, if we start at one end, the borrowers maybe shouldn’t have a mortgage to begin with and we’re finding the possibility of a lot of fraud and inflated values of these homes. On the other end we have large investors that are using tremendous amounts of credit to purchase, namely hedge funds, buying these mortgages and so we have in the middle the banks and these banks are tightening their lines with the hedge funds and on the other end we have people that just can’t pay their mortgages. So this is an event that we’re gonna continue to see fall out in the weeks to come.

Host:In terms of the..you know..what the banks have to tell us about the earnings that they’ve been able to generate through the recent period, are we gonna start to see any big hit to trading income given the difficulty now with which many professionals are having making money in this environment?

Todd: You know Geoff, that’s a fantastic point. If we go back to, let’s say the early 80s and the mid-80s the financial markets were really driven by large pension plans, institutional investors, insurance companies. Through the 90s we saw the markets really dictated by mutual fund managers as the industry in the US grew to 10 trillion dollars. Neither of those two investors in the 80s or the 90s were using a lot of leverage. Today the markets are really being controlled by hedge funds and these hedge funds can lever up 2,3,5,10 times. The other thing that we have to remember is mutual fund managers – they can have a knee-jerk reaction: if the investor is putting in a redemption as an example, that is seen in the market within a matter of a couple of days or a couple of weeks. Hedge funds are using a tremendous amount of leverage but their investors oftentimes need to put in a 60 or 90 day notice where they might have liquidity annually or quarterly. So when we see negative-marked months like July and now August in the hedge fund world, we’ll continue to see redemptions but those redemptions won’t play into the market until some time around the 1st of the year, and that can hit the bottom line of the trading profits from these big banks.

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