Wearing the Green at Barclays Capital
By: If you weren’t looking for it, you might have missed it completely.
But if you knew what to look for, it seemed to be everywhere.
All around the midtown Manhattan offices of Barclays Capital people were wearing green. Green ties. Greens cufflinks. A green scarf. A jade bracelet.
The former Lehman Brothers employees were commemorating the second anniversary of the company's collapse. When BarclaysCapital later bought most of Lehman, it hired many of the employees.
Officially, there was no notice taken of the anniversary. Some employees felt slighted by this. It was a hugely traumatic time in their lives.
“It’s kind of bull— for them to just pretend it never happened,” said one employee who considered wearing green nail polish but instead wore a green necklace.
Lehman used the color green in its market brochures and on the Times Square light panels on the outside of its headquarters. Dick Fuld supposedly said he “bled Lehman green.”
Yesterday, the former Lehman employees at Barclays wore green as a sign of solidarity and, perhaps, as a bit of a protest. Many still wonder why their firm was allowed to go bankrupt while so many others got billions in taxpayer dollars.
“It’s just a sign of…well, a way of saying that we were here. We haven’t forgotten,” one employee said.
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