Lehman Brothers and Bakersfield

If you follow Wall Street you know the biggest company in trouble is Lehman Brothers. The stock has plummeted this year due to some bad mortgage bets.


From Fortune Magazine:

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- To understand what went wrong at Lehman Brothers, leave the canyons of Wall Street and head to the flatlands of Bakersfield, 120 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

That's where you'll find McAllister Ranch, envisioned as a 6,000-home, multibillion-dollar recreational community built around a Greg Norman-designed golf course, boating and fishing waters and a beach club. Now McAllister is three-square miles of fenced-off, almost lunar landscape punctuated by a half-finished clubhouse and a golf course gone to weeds.
So far Lehman's bets on McAllister and other real estate plays in Southern California's Inland Empire have cost Lehman at least $350 million.

None of Lehman's investment bank peers have this kind of exposure to the burst real estate bubble. Then there's the exposure all of them have: problems with collateralized loan obligations, leveraged buyouts, and mortgage-related securities. But Lehman insisted it was only minimally exposed to this kind of stuff.

Turns out, it wasn't. As a result, the bank and its shareholders have endured big losses; messy public demotions of the chief operating officer and chief financial officer; battles with short-sellers, who are betting that Lehman's share price, down about 70% on the year, will decline further; rumblings that the firm will be sold; and rumors (which we consider unfounded) that it will pull a financial El Foldo the way the late Bear Stearns did.