Page 598 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
this was a frequent occurrence in D.C. He told me to expect it virtually every day. (I never saw it again.)
But Washington was very much with us and had an effect on every- thing that we did. Because of the microscope that we were under, appearances of possible wrongdoing or influence were a matter of great and continuing concern (which is not to say that actual wrongdoing or inappropriate influence were not also of great and continuing concern). The issue was not the kind of conduct that the DOJ concerned itself with. It was the day-to-day conduct of our operations and the opera- tions of those with whom we worked—and the possibility of negative publicity that could be generated by that conduct.
Take, for example, our “financial advisors,” whom you will recall from the Home Fed meeting in San Diego. Both the very fact of their involvement and virtually everything that they did were fraught with political overtones or implications. No large disposition of assets could be done without a “financial advisor,” whose role it was to help shape the transaction, to suggest additions or deletions of assets, and generally to work the marketplace to drum up buyers and, hopefully, high purchase prices. The stable of financial advisors included, in addition to Goldman and Lehman Brothers, both of which had been present in San Diego, Bear Stearns, First Boston, Morgan Stanley, and one or two other Wall Street houses the names of which escape me. It was the financial advi- sors who were the chief proponents—for “marketing purposes”—of adding government guaranties to the proposed transactions and having the RTC make countless representations concerning the assets, even though all of the assets were available for inspection by the potential buyers. (As noted below, this was a practice that I eventually success- fully fought against.) It turns out that many of the financial advisors, most visibly Goldman, were acting for their clients far more than they were working for the RTC, but, hey, that’s free market capitalism, that’s the Wall Street way. It even turns out that there’s a basis for believing that some of the houses silently bought into transactions that they were helping the RTC to shape.
• 580 •