Last fall, I posted about those who were losing their jobs when Lehman folded. A month later, I wrote about Lehman CEO Dick Fuld's putting his art collection on the market - the high end version of the just folks hawking their Beanie Baby collections on eBay.
Then I stopped thinking about Lehman.
There were, after all, so many other things to fret: the election, the total economic meltdown, Bernie Madoff, layoffs, layoffs, more layoffs. (Including last week's layoffs at Bernie Madoff's company.)
So I never thought about any of the trickle down impacts of the Lehman fiasco. If I'd given it any thought, I'd have given that thought to tailors who made bespoke suit, cigar bar owners, and, maybe, the little sandwich guy around the corner.
Well, The Wall Street Journal's got me thinking again about the far reaching fallout of the Lehman implosion. (Note: access to this article may require a subscription.)
About $43 billion of Lehman's $639 billion in assets was from the firm's far-flung real-estate operations, which included housing projects, resorts, office buildings and other properties all over the world.
When Lehman went bankrupt, a lot of those who labored on those projects got stuck holding the bag - an empty bag:
Those hurt include hydrologists near San Francisco and chambermaids in Palm Springs. Also left in the lurch were Chinese laborers who were flown into the Turks and Caicos Islands in the West Indies to help build a Ritz-Carlton resort. The workers stopped getting paychecks abruptly after the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. About 60 of them followed managers of the project around the property until they finally got paid.
Another one of their ventures was a housing development in Oakland. And one of the small businesses that worked on that project was Goats R Us, which:
...provide[s] communities with environmentally friendly vegetation management as well as public education about alternatives to traditional abatement techniques.
Those vegetation managers are the goats.
Big land owners use goats for fire control because they are dependable and hard-working. They clear brush and poison oak, which two-legged landscapers try to avoid. The goats also are often preferable to herbicides, especially in residential areas.
The Goats R Us critters have been working that site for years, since it was a Navy hospital. A couple of times a year, the owners schlepped 1,000 goats to the site, where they grazed to their tummies content, under the watchful eye of Peruvian and Chilean ranchers.
Now, this all-natural, do-good company is out $53K for work they did, and which they'll likely never be reimbursed for.
Goats R Us, of course, didn't know Lehman from a pile of tin cans or a heap of goat turds.
They'd been hired by SunCal, a California-based developer that was partnering with Lehman. Thanks in part to Lehman, SunCal's got problems of its own: some 450 creditors knocking at its door, including the Goats R Us folks.
SunCal claims that they were "assured by Lehman" that the little guys would get paid. But the Lehman estate, which is handling the bankruptcy, is head-butting with SunCal about whether to foreclose on the SunCal properties or, as is SunCal's preference, see if they can keep them going.
$53K is a lot of money for Goats R Us. It "nearly equals her annual alfalfa budget."
As for the goats themselves, the owner:
...says the goats will be cared for and will never be sold for meat. After they become too old to travel, they "retire" with medical care to the family ranch.
Even though I don't eat goat meat, that's comforting to know.
With everything that's going on, these are the kind of stories we'll be ruminating on for years to come.
Baaaaahhhhhhhh.
1 comment:
It appears that working for the receiver of Lehman is now a hot (although less well paying) job on wall street. The estimate is that its two to three years minimum to dispose the assets into the bankruptcy. So if you are at Lehman as an asset disposer your kids get to at least graduate from State U vs Middlebury
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