CheckMate

I love stories about comebacks. This one would be great to read anytime, but especially so now with what’s going on daily in the markets and the economy.

The headline pretty much tells the story - “A return to his calling - Louisville’s Hallion goes from out of umpiring to in the Fall Classic” - but let me give you a condensed summary.

Tom Hallion decided he wanted to be a baseball umpire in 1979, so he quit going to college, took money out of savings, went to umpire school, and spent the next six years working his way up to the major leagues. In 1999, he was one of the many umpires who quit their jobs during a contract argument with Major League Baseball, thinking they would finally get some action on their demands. Instead, they found themselves out on the street with no jobs.

You can read the rest of the story at the link to find out how he got there, but here’s the bottom line:

“Tomorrow night he’ll position himself down the third-base line in Florida.”

Yep, Tom Hallion is umpiring in the World Series this year.

Comebacks do happen, and don’t ever forget that.

For all the current discussion about just what’s caused the current problems in the financial markets, I really haven’t seen much about the exact, specific actions on specific dates that caused things to fall.

I just read two very interesting articles that are the exception to that and revolve around the same theme - the role of JPMorgan Chase in the failure of both Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.

There’s a lot of speculation about the intent and exact nature of JPMorgan’s actions, but, in my opinion, what’s not in question is that in both cases those actions were the proverbial last straw and drove both Lehman and Merrill under.

The first article is a NY Times piece called “The Road to Lehman’s Failure Was Littered With Lost Chances“. It’s a really good outline of the timeline of the demise of Lehman, but what was most interesting to me was this part:

Lehman executives complain bitterly that any chance of keeping the firm alive began to dissipate rapidly just after Labor Day when JPMorgan Chase, which handled Lehman’s trades, came calling for more money. Lehman had put down securities it believed were worth $6 billion during the summer to assuage the bank’s concerns that its trades were risky. But JPMorgan thought those securities had deteriorated in value, and asked for $5 billion in cash or liquid assets on Sept. 4.

Over the course of the next week, JPMorgan requested more money from Lehman. However, executives at the two companies disagree over how much money was requested and whether the requests were reasonable. The dispute has become part of a legal claim filed by creditors of Lehman.

I’m surely not on the inside to know exactly what happened, but I think it’s pretty clear that JPMorgan basically called Lehman on the loans they had out with the result being that it was “the end of the line”.

The second article - “Was Merrill ‘Chase-d’ Into Its BofA Marriage?” - at CNBC refers to the Lehman situation and states that JPMorgan pulled the same move with Merrill they had with Lehman:

On Friday Sept. 12, Chase officially alerted Merrill it wanted an additional $5 billion in collateral. Merrill did not come up with the collateral.

Around that time, Merrill began negotiating with Bank of America. That Saturday Merrill’s chief of strategy, Peter Kraus, told Chase that Merrill wasn’t going to deliver the collateral — but not because of liquidity issues. Merrill was objecting to the principle of asking for additional collateral.

By Sunday night September 14, Bank of America purchased Merrill.

I’m not sure why I haven’t seen more discussion about this one, frankly, along with a lot more questions about JPMorgan Chase’s timing and logic behind calling both firms on their loans. It sure would be very educational to know the significance of the timing - just why did JPMorgan feel that they had to press the issue with both firms during the first two weeks of September? And who at JPMorgan made that call?

This is just a wonderful story I ran across today, and a tremendous example of a financial advisor who’s making a big charitable impact. It’d be a great story anytime, but especially so now with the daily dose of financial sector bad news, finger pointing, and “Who shot John?” blame that’s going around.

Phil Eggers is a financial advisor in Plano, Texas who is also a pilot and the President of the Board of Directors at Grace Flight of America, an organization of volunteer pilots who fly patients to get specialized medical treatment that isn’t available to them locally. Most, if not all, of those patients are either in locations without scheduled air service, simply aren’t able to afford that type of travel, or both.

Check out Phil’s story at “Adviser gives back, with flying colors”. There are a number of very touching testimonials from those who’ve benefited from Grace Flight, and Phil also describes how he came to be a successful financial advisor. I liked his comment here a lot:

The 43-year-old Mr. Eggers is happy to help people in need.

“I didn’t have squat growing up,” he recalled.

Financial services was his ticket out of his Iowa farm community, and Mr. Eggers said he knew he wanted to be an investment adviser since he was in middle school, inspired by a cousin who was a broker and the “the success in the family.”

Clearly somebody who has never forgotten where he came from.

As I’ve said before, we generally don’t toot our own horn around here, but sometimes we do make exceptions.

Some of the work that our Managing Partner, Dr. Chris Howard, is doing in the area of diversity recruiting is really outstanding, and I want to brag a little about my very close friend and business partner.

As the youngest Falcon Foundation Board of Trustees member, Chris chairs the Diversity Committee and is leading a $220,000, multiple year initiative in select school districts to increase the candidate pool of minority applicants to the U.S. Air Force Academy.

In addition, Chris has also received a federal planning grant from the Commission on National and Community Service to create an AmeriCorps program at the University of Oklahoma meant to increase graduation rates among under-represented minority students.

I could go on - Chris always has so many plates spinning in the air at one time I can’t even keep up with him - but I’ll just leave it at that for now. I just wanted to mention how proud I am of Dr. Chris Howard, and how fortunate we are to have someone with his great talent and commitment associated with this company.