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Presidential Biographies — members — last activity Aug 24, Within a few days, the administrators [PricewaterhouseCoopers] told us if we stayed through September we might get paid for the month. It felt very strange, but we kept going into work. Sitting on the trading floor, we updated our CVs and spent our days job searching. Headhunters had parked themselves in the Starbucks downstairs. The bathrooms started getting dirty, because the outsourced cleaning companies stopped providing services immediately. Employees were buying armfuls of sweets at our internal snack shop to spend the money on their cash-loaded cards, which made me sad: It was a traumatic experience, really.

I suppose everyone deals with it differently. Lehman was a collegiate place. I strongly identified with my work and remember thinking, had those four years all gone down the drain? It felt like a big part of me had suddenly disappeared. In the following months I started grinding my teeth and suffered from terrible migraines. I heard that others, particularly those who had worked at Lehman longer, suffered much more serious health issues.

john-isms (quotes)

To me, the financial crisis was a strong warning sign that the finance sector needed to change. It showed that taking care of environmental and social issues and stakeholders is critical to business survival. However, most people around me were not interested in integrating sustainability issues into business practices. It felt like nothing had changed and I became quickly frustrated. Because I'd worked in the City for my entire working life, I decided I wanted to make a change, and work for an organisation that took sustainability seriously.

I took a job as a financial sector policy adviser at Oxfam. But I took it. When you work in the City, you get used to the money. And if you don't have a strong reason to change, it's tempting to stay because you get paid so well. Without the external shock of the crisis, I could easily have stayed there longer, getting increasingly disillusioned and unhappy. I really needed to be inspired, and to find purpose in work.

My role at Oxfam gave me a wide-ranging experience, from engaging with investors on human rights issues to researching how global companies sourced materials, and their tax and lobbying activities. Taking the plunge proved worth it.

I learnt more working for Oxfam in less than three years than I did in nine years at an investment bank. PRI works with investors to incorporate environmental, social and governance factors into investment practices. My focus now is on the sustainable development goals — they are ambitious goals agreed by countries of the UN to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all by I studied economics and went to business school, but neither taught me to think critically about the purpose of finance. Most people in finance look at spreadsheets and screens all day, having only learnt one type of economic theory.

In , I bought a house in Florida at the height of the market for less than I could afford. I qualified for more, but didn't want to overstretch, as my then husband and I were having a second baby. We were at the right point in our lives: It was a bad move, but we really didn't know that at the time.

Everybody was buying houses. The real estate market was exploding. Our realtor, the bank, advisers, everyone who approved me for a mortgage all suggested I find something better or newer than the house I chose. They really tried to influence me to spend more. Central Florida is not like New York. Our house cost less than we were making per year. So we thought, we can easily afford this and I can take a year off and raise the kids. It was somewhere between and when things started to really decline. We were aware that the economy wasn't doing well, and obviously that was reflected in our business: They'd get inexpensive prepackaged websites and ask us to tweak them or hire their cousin for a few hundred bucks.

I think my husband kept up with that more than I did. I had little kids. It seems he was panicked about our loss of income, because one day he took all of our money and ran. Desperate times can really change people. I was left with a two-year-old, a six-year-old, no business, a one-day-a-week nursing job, a big house that I couldn't afford by myself and a lot of debt. I lived in the house for the next few years, watching its value drop to half of what I paid for it. Crime in my neighborhood exploded.

My house was robbed five times, even with a security system. Anything the kids left outside, like skateboards and bikes, disappeared by morning. Before the crisis, we had never had that problem. I had to learn how to be poor again.

It was like being in college, but with kids. In , I claimed bankruptcy. My credit was destroyed. When I bought the house my score was low s, almost perfect. Then I was bankrupt with a score of I had to build my credit back up because no one wanted to rent to me, and to do that I needed to stop paying the mortgage. I felt like a loser doing that, but it was the only way I could get back on my feet.

I didn't have anyone I could stay with. My parents helped me watch my kids while I worked three jobs. I just stopped paying the mortgage and eventually lost my house. It probably took me six full years to recover financially, to get my credit back to average, build up a decent income, some small savings, and start contributing to my k [retirement savings plan]. I went back to school last year for my masters degree, and next year I'll graduate and become a nurse practitioner. I was reluctant to take on student loans, but decided it was worth it because I'll be doubling my income.

The crisis has made me do a lot more research before making any big decisions. I feel less safe now than I did before the crisis. I learnt from experience that the little guy is not the priority. Corporate America might get a bailout, but no one was going to bail me out. I was on the Sunday night conference call on September 14 when Paul Tucker from the Bank of England told representatives of all the big City firms and infrastructure that the Barclays acquisition of Lehman had failed, and Lehman was going to go down the pan the following morning.

It was just a monumental time. Lehman was a global titan. The idea that it would collapse was unthinkable. We knew there were issues in the market; prices were all over the shop. But we went into that weekend assuming that someone would step in and a deal would be done. There must have been odd institutions on that Sunday night call.

When Paul told us that Lehman would go down the next day, nobody said anything. When in doubt, keep it short. We went around the call and everybody said the same thing. The next morning, I got the 4. Exchanges have these archaic but useful things called default rules, where you freeze all of the unsettled transactions and cash settle them out, with just a net amount owed between each institution. But nobody had ever done a bank administration of this size.

1. Account Options.
2. Weathering the financial crisis: how seven lives were changed.
3. Prince Mengchang.

They had done supermarkets and factories, but nothing of this complexity. It was on the top floor, with great views down the river. I had been up there before for lunch, and remembered it with thick carpets and chaps in white gloves. It had been a real place of tranquillity. But this time, all the paintings were gone from the walls. Gangs of year-olds were running between rooms with laptops, clearly with little idea of what they were supposed to be doing.

I walked PwC and their lawyers through our processes. It seemed they had never even heard of Stock Exchange default rules. It took an hour or two of explaining. They were pretty relieved that at least the unsettled equity trades would be sorted by someone else. That was just the start. Over the subsequent weeks we watched the prices of some of the largest financial institutions in the world drop by huge percentages every day: When you realised Bank of America and Merrill Lynch would have to be bashed together overnight, that Goldman was potentially going to have to be rescued… can you imagine?

Even they had to go cap in hand to Warren Buffett. It felt like absolute Armageddon. It was awful at the time, but I've spent the rest of my career dealing with regulation, and it has been a bit of a golden era since the crisis. We were seen as a block. Now demand for good experience in this area has rocketed. It is taken seriously.

Regulation and compliance has become a proper career. What the crisis threw into sharp relief is that you absolutely cannot run an economy without an effective financial services sector. The damage that this crisis caused to the real economy was quite sobering. We live in a bubble in financial services. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably kidding you.

We get paid more than most industries do. Do we deserve it? Not in my view. Are people much cleverer in financial services than in other industries? No, not in my view. Most of us are just relatively high-achieving doers. The good times rolled for a long time, and it all came crashing down and the party ended rather unceremoniously. Ninety-five per cent of people don't understand what happened in the crisis at all. The industry took such a hit, including institutions that have been around for hundreds of years and had reputations for being trusted fortresses where you could put your money.

That trust just went. The sheer fragility of it was quite scary. Reputations are hard won and easily lost, and it's going to take a long time to rebuild that confidence fully. I'll be honest with you, I was quite materialistic before the crisis.