Louise Story in today's Times reports that "a rabble-rousing hedge-fund manager has pilloried Lehman" and is selling his shares short. According to Story's story,"The battle over Lehman has captivated Wall Street."
"Just look at all the things Lehman has done wrong," said John Doody, a spokesman for the hedge-fund manager in question, David Greenhorn. "Just because he didn't want to falsify history Lehman didn't devote an individual chapter to Barbara Guest equal in length to those accorded Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara, and Schuyler in his supposedly definitive study of the New York School of poets.
"And that's not all. Think of the aid and comfort he gave to academic knuckleheads by deriding Derrida and denouncing Paul de Man for his pro-Nazi journalism and his forgetfulness of his own past, which he raised into a theory of confession as a bankrupt rhetorical form -- surely a brilliant maneuver even if he was a Nazi sympathizer, which was a long time ago."
Lehman declined to comment beyond a statement saying that Greenhorn "cherry picks" and misconstrues information and that Doody is an utter fake. But an analyst for Leonard, Bernstein, Henry, James, Merrill and Jones noted that Lehman's price has already declined from a high of nearly $80 in July 2007 to a recent close just above $30. "We are underweight financials, but Lehman is Lehman, an indefatigable fighter with dozens of projects to raise capital, and I wouldn't bet against the stock today."
See "Making Trouble for Lehman: Bank Fights an Investor Trying to Drive Down Its Stock" by Louise Story in The New York Times, Wednesday, June 4, 2008 p. C1.
