The first senator to ask questions had a crew cut, a beaky nose, and a rough gaze. He stared at Harry and Greene as if they were beneath him, not just physically but morally, and thrust a hand up to scratch his temple as he spoke.
“Mr. Shapiro, that all sounds dandy, but I’m puzzled by one thing. If everything you did was fine, then why did you step down?”
“Senator, I believed Seligman needed a fresh start after-”
“Come on, you didn’t resign, did you? You were fired. You were forced out because you’d made a mess of it, hadn’t you?”
Harry flinched, but then the accusation seemed to fire him up. He tilted his head toward the senator like a bull getting ready to charge toward the matador’s red cloak and spoke in a fierce, controlled tone.
“Given the failure of the firm and our need to accept capital from the taxpayer, I resigned as a matter of honor.”
Good line, I thought. As the camera lingered, I peered past Harry at Felix, but his face was inscrutable. The questioning passed to the Republican side of the table, led by a roly-poly senator with a bulging shirt who lolled back in his chair. He smiled at Greene apologetically, as if he’d been shocked by the preceding rudeness.
“Mr. Greene, you told us in your opening statement that you came from a middle-class family?”
“That’s right, Senator Highfield. My father was not a Wall Street guy. He worked as a mechanic. I managed to win a college scholarship and I supported myself by working during vacations.”
“I expect you worked hard,” the senator said encouragingly.
“I did, Senator. My father always wanted me to get a good job, to achieve more than he’d been able to. He was a GI, fought in Normandy. He was a hero to me.”
“So you got to Wall Street. How’d that happen?”
“I was lucky. Rosenthal recruited me out of Rutgers. They had an open mind, took people from all kinds of places as long as they were bright and scrappy.”
A few of the senators released a rumble of laughter, but others stayed stony-faced, not wanting to be seen sympathizing on television with Wall Street, I imagined.
“Then you were enterprising enough to start your own bank. It says here that you got to be a billionaire, is that right?”
“On paper, that might still be true. I don’t feel as rich as I used to,” he said. A few more senators joined in that time.
“So why did you sell your bank to Mr. Shapiro last year? I’d have thought you liked being independent.”
“I didn’t see it that way, Senator. Harry and I joined forces to make a bigger firm, one we believed could compete in the big leagues. I believed I could learn from Harry. He’d teach me a few tricks.”
Harry shot Greene an ambiguous glance, half appreciation for the remark and half unease. I thought of what had happened just six months later-the mess that Harry had made of Greene’s body. Perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed the tension if I hadn’t known the outcome, but there was something unnerving in the stiff way they sat next to each other, as if divided by an invisible barrier.
The next senator was a Democrat, a woman in her sixties who was technocratic and stern. She spat out her questions crisply, hardly looking at the witness who was answering, but Greene didn’t appear bothered.
“Mr. Greene, can you explain to some of us who are still baffled exactly how your bank came to need the taxpayers’ assistance?”
“Senator, it’s complicated and I don’t think that anyone here, myself included, fully understood the risks we were taking. As I said before, mistakes were made and I bear full responsibility for those errors.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that-” she interjected sharply, but Greene carried on talking, and she gave way.
“Let me try to explain this as best I can,” he continued. “Our trading desk held mortgage paper that it considered entirely safe. It was triple-A paper that no one believed was in danger of default. Those positions were not reported to the risk committee.”
“You mean you didn’t even know they were there?”
Greene sighed heavily and closed his eyes for an instant, as if the blunder still pained him. “Unfortunately not. There were flaws in the risk management procedures at Seligman. It examined what it believed were risky assets, and it didn’t include any of these CDOs. That stands for collateralized debt obligations, by the way. There are many abbreviations on Wall Street, I’m afraid.”
Greene had something, I thought. Imperceptibly, he’d managed to seize control of the hearing and was overriding the questions to present the story he’d prepared. He had a natural authority that subdued others without them realizing it. It sounded as if he were giving a lesson to an appreciative audience, rather than defending himself.
“What happened to these CDOs?” the senator asked obediently.
“This spring, mortgage-backed securities started to fall along with house prices in a way that no one had anticipated. In May, the senior management was informed that heavy losses were occurring on the CDO tranches. I believe the projection was a $5 billion loss. Our estimate now …” Greene glanced at a sheet of paper on the desk and read out a figure dispassionately: “is $21.6 billion.”
The senator looked at Greene openmouthed. “And you had no idea about this before you lost those billions? You were in the dark?”
Greene held his right hand half-clenched and thrust out to emphasize his words. “Let me address this, because it is absolutely the right question. When I took over as chief executive, I made a complete examination of our balance sheet. I found we had been using too much leverage and didn’t have a thorough grasp of some of the instruments we had been trading. I put a halt to it immediately.”
The senator still looked astonished, but Greene had managed subtly to deflect attention from himself. He’d become an expert witness explaining the financial complexities, not the one who should be answering for the mess.
“Who ran Seligman while it was doing this and crying to the government for $10 billion to stay in business? Who was in charge?”
Greene paused and looked hesitant. He glanced fractionally sideways at Harry, as if not wanting to say it himself. The camera cut to Harry, who looked crushed. He sat upright and his tongue flicked out of his mouth to moisten his lips, like a reptile. Then, with Greene still silent, he leaned forward to the microphone.
“I was, Senator,” Harry croaked.
She shook her head disgustedly. “It sounds as if there was a very good reason why you resigned, Mr. Shapiro. You’d run your bank into the ground.”
I could see Felix’s eyes focus over Harry’s shoulder as he waited to hear the reply. Harry looked on the verge of losing control, but he mastered himself with a visible effort. As he did, and before he could speak, Greene grimaced and reached across the invisible barrier between them. He put a hand on Harry’s shoulder, apparently in sympathy.
“Harry did what he believed was right at the time,” Greene said. “He wasn’t the only executive on Wall Street who made a mistake.”
Harry stayed stiffly in position, and I heard the rustle of photographers in the background grabbing their shots for the next day’s papers. The camera pulled back to show Harry and Greene stand and huddle in separate knots of advisers. Underwood appeared at Greene’s shoulder. Nora moved up to Harry and held his hand as if he were a child who had to be protected from harm, while he gazed desolately into the middle distance.
I reached for my mouse to click off the hearing, but I stopped as the last frames played. A few yards behind Harry, I spotted Anna. She must have gone to the hearing with Nora and Harry, but she hadn’t walked forward. Instead, she was standing and talking to a middle-aged woman I didn’t recognize, with a sharp nose and gaunt face. They were standing close to each other, as if they were well acquainted, and the last thing I saw before the tape halted and the C-SPAN logo filled the screen was her raising one hand to stroke Anna’s arm. It looked like a gesture of comfort.