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Stop the Bleeding
"Liquidate them by the time my margarita arrives."
Happy Friday — and welcome all new subscribers!
Given July 4th next week, I plan to skip hitting send on the standard Friday email. I look forward to picking it back up the following week!
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Quote of the Week
The time to figure out what went wrong is after you stop the bleeding.
— Rich Handler, CEO of Jefferies
In 2021, one of Jefferies’ large clients, Archegos, lost somewhere between $8bn and $20bn over a few days.
Jefferies’ CEO, Rich Handler, is famous for having saved his bank a lot of money — and doing so in a somewhat stylish way:
Jefferies calls CEO Rich Handler, who is on holiday in Turks and Caicos with a spicy margarita on the way. They tell him Archegos isn’t answering their calls. Handler says he’s going to get his cocktail and he wants Archegos positions gone and a tally of losses by the time he comes back.
It was one of the few banks that escaped with minimal losses.
You see, a number of banks had loaned funds to Archegos. Those loans were backed by the securities Archegos owned. As the company started to unravel (due apparently to fraud, amongst other things), the banks asked for their money back.
Archegos stopped taking their phone calls.
Jefferies, thanks to Handler’s advice above to “liquidate them by the time my margarita arrives“, was one of the first lenders to start liquidating the assets Archegos held to pay off their loans.
Other banks were not so fast to move, and consequently did not avoid as much of the pain. Estimated losses, per a Wikipedia summary:
Company | Loss ($mm) |
---|---|
Credit Suisse | $5,500 |
Nomura | $2,850 |
Morgan Stanley | $911 |
UBS | $774 |
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial | $300 |
Why did all the banks here lose so much?
Once it was obvious something was wrong at Archegos, the banks tried to understand what was wrong while they were watching themselves lose money. As they tried to understand what was happening, they kept bleeding.
Jefferies, on the other hand, stopped the bleeding. After everything was bandaged, for them at least, they could take a breath and understand what had happened.
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Poll of the Week
If you have a mortgage, what is your interest rate? |
Last Week
Question: In an average week, do you spend more time reading or listening (podcast, similar)?
Results: 58% of responders spend more time reading — I would be in the same camp. Though, since we had our first kid, podcasts have taken up a larger and larger share.
Things to Read (and Listen to)
Too Far | From What Will Future Humans Look Like by Natalie Wolchover, 2012
According to Stephen Stearns, a Yale professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, before the invention of the bicycle, the average distance between the birthplaces of spouses in England was 1 mile (1.6 kilometers). During the latter half of the 19th century, bikes upped the distance men went courting to 30 miles (48 km), on average. Scholars have identified similar patterns in other European countries. Widespread use of bicycles stimulated the grading and paving of roads, lending credence to the Fugate clan's excuse and making way for the introduction of automobiles. Love's horizons have kept expanding ever since.
"The distance between the birthplaces of parents has continued to increase since the invention of the bicycle, making it now easy, if not standard, for parents to have been born on different continents," Stearns told Life's Little Mysteries.
What is Great? | From On the Reign of Alexander by Bret Devereaux, 2024
Alexander has a lot of failings, and we’re going to get to them. But he was unnaturally composed and at least when it came to doing violence (and getting others to do violence effectively) he was highly competent, almost absurdly so. Not because he had some sort of world-shaking flash of brilliant insight, of ‘genius’ in the popular sense, but because he had a composed, calm but determined mind with an intuitive grasp of what his army was capable of and what simple solutions would work and be required in the moment, genius in the Clausewitzian sense (drink!).
The question that raises, of course, is a value judgement: is it enough to merely be good at killing and destroying in order to be great?
Too Cheap | From America’s Frozen Housing Market by Carol Ryan, 2024
As more owners stay put, the number of homes on the market has fallen. Tight supply is pushing prices higher, shrinking the pool of buyers who can afford a home. A household earning $100,000 a year can only afford 37% of home listings today, according to the NAR. In a balanced market where there is around five months’ supply of inventory available the number should be 62%…
Craig Picken, co-founder of Northstar Group, a search and recruiting firm of top talent in the aerospace sector, said that it had become difficult to match companies with the right executives because relocations have financial costs that neither employees nor employers want to shoulder. He gave the example of a vice president of engineering trapped in a “toxic and bureaucratic” workplace with a long commute who nonetheless turned down a new role because he had an existing 3% mortgage.
“His decision came down to an Excel spreadsheet…The salary increase he’d get with the new job was eaten by higher mortgage costs,” says Picken.
Alone | From They Choose to Live in Isolation by Adam Goodheart, 2023
There seems to be no simple explanation for how the Sentinelese, of all the human communities on Earth, have managed to remain so isolated for so long. Now and then over the past couple of centuries—first when the British extended their empire across the Andaman Islands in the 1850s and later after India took control of the archipelago—various outsiders have tried to make contact with North Sentinel locals.
From 1967 to the early 2000s, Indian government anthropologists occasionally were able to approach the beach by boat, twice in 1991 even drawing close enough to hand coconuts and bananas to islanders in the surf. More often, the Sentinelese simply melt away into the jungle when intruders draw too near or respond as they did to Chau: first with gestures and exclamations that unmistakably communicate warning—and then, if that fails, with volleys of arrows…
Although the Sentinelese can’t see these huts from their own settlements, they can likely see the yellowish gray smog that hangs over Port Blair, the islands’ administrative capital. They can definitely see the passenger jets, which pass close enough that tourists press their faces and phones against the windows to capture Instagram-bound images. Certainly the Sentinelese, sharp-eyed hunter-gatherers, have observed the outside world as intently as the outside world has observed them; more so, probably, since our boats and flying machines have by now become familiar parts of their surroundings.
Visuals
Tesla Growing Slower Than the EV Market
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/c56661b0-e0db-4ef5-823c-408394713d00/image.png?t=1719540952)
Startup Shutdowns Hit a New High
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/4bf5b6cd-5692-4931-83a1-23b922fb86d9/image.png?t=1719541434)
If you found today’s issue interesting, more than anything, I would appreciate you forwarding it to someone that might also enjoy it. It is a big deal to me whenever someone reads my work, so I appreciate your support.
Have a great weekend,
EJ
Twitter / X: @HistoryEJ
Disclosure: Nothing in this article constitutes investment advice. More detailed disclosure here.
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