Boston Gal's Open Wallet

LAWRENCE MCDONALD: At the end of the day, I think there was gross negligence of the highest order at Lehman Brothers, in terms of ignoring the growing problems of subprime. There were people that tried to stop this madness. There were people that tried. One by one by one, they were squashed like grapes, and they were silenced. At Lehman Brothers, you kept your head down, you did your job, or you lost both.

PAUL SOLMAN: In fact, McDonald, who's written a book on Lehman's collapse, was a member of Lehman's distressed debt group, which made bets against bonds like mortgage-backed securities, treating them as insecurities, you might say.

LAWRENCE MCDONALD: And in 2008, that group made over $2 billion, and a lot of that was made betting against what the executives were doing up on that 31st floor. So the people that I worked with were betting against these toxic assets. And the people on 31st floor were getting deeper and deeper and deeper into it.