Three days before Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, Bob Diamond was ushered into a conference room with “buyer” hand-written on the door at the New York Federal Reserve Bank in Manhattan.
As the Barclays boss closed on a deal for Lehman, Mr Diamond says the opportunity looked “wonderful” — even if he remains frustrated he could not reach agreement before it collapsed which, he adds, may have averted the worst of the financial crisis. In the end, Barclays bought much of Lehman’s US operations out of bankruptcy.
At that time, Barclays was among the European banks riding high even as the US banking system went into meltdown, with ambitions to be among those left to pick over what was left after the subprime mortgage crisis had run its course.