In the previous life, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers occurred in September, but in this life, it was more than a month ahead of schedule, and it could not survive on August 10. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

When the U.S. Treasury Department announced that Lehman was not part of their rescue plan, it shocked many people to lose their glasses. Lehman, who had been full of confidence and continued to eat into housing subprime credit contracts CDO and CDS in the first half of the year, has become a realistic spokesperson who will not die.

Before Lehman's bankruptcy, both Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch had the support of the Treasury Department. Bear Stearns reassessed the debt and assets and shared them with other agencies. Merrill Lynch, on the other hand, has received $50 billion in funding from the Ministry of Finance.

However, everyone knows very well that whether it is Bear Stearns or Merrill Lynch, when they encounter a crisis, they are responding to the crisis according to the response plan given by the Ministry of Finance, so the Ministry of Finance will save them.

Lehman, despite the fact that his situation was already precarious, still picked up cheap everywhere and ate large contracts cheaply. Eventually, they will never wait for the dawn to come.

By the time Lehman went bankrupt, their book liabilities had reached more than $600 billion. No institution wants to pay for their stupidity, and they can only declare bankruptcy.

At this time, the people who traveled around the investment department of the head office were all amazed, and they were fortunate not to step into the big pit of Lehman. You must know that last year, the people in the investment department were still persuading Zhou You to let him join Lehman, but Zhou You vetoed it.

At that time, they also thought that Zhou You had given up a great opportunity, and now they were only left to rejoice, so they were also more convinced of Zhou You's vision.

Recently, New York has brought together a large number of CEOs of international institutions, all of whom are interested in Lehman's assets and want to take advantage of the opportunity to pick up a bargain.

However, Zhouyou's investment department has already been based in New York, and has also submitted letters of intent to acquire some of Lehman's assets, including Lehman Brothers' headquarters in New York and two data centers.

Zhou You is not without competitors, he is competing with Barclays, the third largest bank in the United Kingdom. However, since it is a bargain, of course, the two sides will not bid brainlessly and let the Americans pick up the bargain.

After knowing that Zhou You was also interested in Lehman Headquarters, Sir Bottin, chairman of the board of directors of Barclays, sent Zhou You an invitation to meet, and the two sides were ready to reach an agreement first.

"Honey, I need to go back to Los Angeles to prepare for next year's Spring/Summer fashion show, and you need to be obedient in New York. Gracia said that you are not allowed to provoke the chicks outside. ”

"Don't worry, I won't have much time fooling around with women in the near future."

Paris glanced at Le Yao, who was looking down at the pictorial, and hugged Zhou You for a passionate kiss like a demonstration, and then said a little hypocritically: "Isabella, for this period of time, Evan will ask you to take care of it." ”

Le Yao raised her head and smiled: "Paris, I will take care of him, and I won't let him fool around with other women." ”

"That's for the best, I'll give you the latest Paris fashion for autumn and winter."

At New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, Zhou You's convoy with diplomatic plates pulled off the plane, and the plane flew Paris back to Los Angeles, while Zhou You, with his team of bodyguards, took a car to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue.

As soon as Le Yao got in the car, she pouted and said, "Paris is so superficial, I don't know where she attracted you." ”

Zhou You touched the back of her hand and said with a smile: "Her vulgar superficiality just reflects your freshness and refinement, isn't it better?" I found you a tour guide who will accompany you to spend a few days in New York, and I am afraid I won't have much time to spend with you during the day. ”

"It's important to get down to business, I'm not here to let you accompany you, but specifically to accompany you."

Zhou You could only say: "Don't take their words seriously, they just say this, they are just a little jealous of your youth." ”

Although Le Yao is the object that the three women have recognized, they don't really look at her. The main reason is that they have all given birth to children, but Le Yao has not. Now the agreement they reached is to let Le Yao accept her if she can't have children before the age of forty, which is actually very unfair to Le Yao.

However, Le Yao's goal is to be a literary star, and she didn't want to have children too early, so Le Yao also accepted this condition.

Although Paris is now the chairman of the board of directors of Hilton and Hilton has a complete management team, everyone knows that the actual helmsman of Hilton is Zhou You.

After Paris took over as chairman of the board, the Waldorf Astoria renovated Paris's long-term private rooms and designed them in a Chinese style according to the preferences of the tour.

Although Zhou You knew about it, it was the first time he lived in, and he felt very satisfied when he saw this private room. Located in a 42-storey tower, this private dining room has four bedrooms, two reception rooms, a grand ballroom, an office, and a separate kitchen and elevator.

Outside the private rooms, several rooms have been converted into office areas and entourage rooms, occupying the southwest corner of the entire 42nd floor, which is more comfortable than buying a villa in New York alone.

After Le Yao came in, she quickly chose a bedroom with a Turkish queen bed and laid out her luggage for herself and Zhou You. Then he called the butler and began to arrange dinner for Zhou You and a group of entourage.

In the large living room, sitting opposite Zhou You, Sanchez, Ma Hongtao, his special assistant Rodriguez, and legal counsel Demosa. Lin Han from the investment department, with a large number of senior managers, is reporting to Zhou You the results of their work during this period of time.

"Barclays also has its own headquarters in New York, so they are not very interested in buying Lehman's headquarters, and their main target is the other party's data center. According to our estimates, they are asking about $1 billion for the headquarters building and about $800 million for the two data centers. ”

Zhou You has long known this data, because the actual transaction price between Barclays and Lehman is $1.75 billion, which is similar to their estimates. It can also be seen from this that Lin Han and they still have done a lot of homework.

"Lehman's data center has all the operating data of the past 100 years, and more importantly, their complete sales and management network, which is indescribable for our development in the direction of investment banking. Unlike Barclays, they have their own well-established network, and Lehman's data is just an effective supplement to them. Therefore, we cannot give up this competition. ”

Lin Han shook his head and said: "Boss, Barclays Bank attaches much more importance to maintaining a relationship with us than to Lehman Assets, so they will not compete with us, but what we need to know now is what price they need to pay if we give up competing for Lehman's assets." ”

Zhou You smiled indifferently and said, "That's why I came to New York." ”

Early the next morning, Zhou You was in his living room and met with Sir Botin of Barclays Bank. There was an open and frank exchange of views and an exchange of valuation information on some of Lehman Brothers' high-quality assets.

Lehman now has few high-quality assets left relative to their huge business. For example, he has hundreds of billions of dollars in subprime mortgage contracts, which no one will be interested in. Their investment and share buyback in many industrial industries will also be dominated by their partners, and they just want to compete, but they are also congenitally insufficient.

At present, Lehman's high-quality assets are not only the headquarters and two data centers in New York, but also a large shale oil field in Eagle Beach, Texas, but Zhou You knows that the price of oil will fall in the future, and this high-quality asset will become a big hole in the future.

In an effort to crack down on shale oil development in the United States, OPEC has pushed the price of oil from $120 to $40. Although the development cost of shale oil has been reduced to about $50 per barrel after the technology has matured, when the price of oil is lower than $60 per barrel, the more they extract, the more they lose.

In addition, many of Lehman Brothers' investments in Asia and the impact of the portfolio crisis were not significant, but Zhou You did not have much interest, because he was more interested in the more than 10,000 experienced investors after Lehman's bankruptcy. He doesn't need to take all these more than 10,000 people under his command, he only needs one or two thousand people at all levels to quickly replicate these businesses.

Botin is a very realistic person, and he knows very well that Barclays Bank and Zhou You's competition will definitely not win. Rather than competing to take advantage of Americans, it is better to sell favors and get some benefits from other places.

They are interested in HSBC's investment data in Asia and Santander's investment data in South America, and he is not very demanding, but he hopes to cooperate with these two banks in these two regions to jointly promote Barclays' investment business development in these two regions.

Zhou You did not directly agree to this condition, although he is the majority shareholder of the two banks, he has also arranged Sanchez into the management compared to now. But after all, it is not an absolute control, so these still have to seek the consent of HSBC and Santander.

Barclays has actually started to decline since this time, they were originally the largest bank in the United Kingdom, the largest bank in Europe, and then they were overtaken by HSBC and then Santander, and after that, they can only compete with the Royal Bank of Scotland for the second place among banks in the United Kingdom.

The meeting was very constructive, and the next day, Barclays announced in New York that it was abandoning its bid for Lehman's headquarters and data center.

For Lehman, this news is a bit of a house leak and even rainy. However, shopping malls are like battlefields, at this time, interests are paramount, bidding Lehman will offend Zhou You, and Barclays will naturally know how to choose.

Their withdrawal made Lehman's negotiators have no confidence, not to mention, Zhou You also promised that Lehman headquarters will not carry out large-scale layoffs except for the subprime mortgage department, and these negotiators may work for Zhou You in the future.

Therefore, it took less than a week from the time of the tour to New York, and the whole negotiation was completely finalized. That's a lot of speed for a $1.8 billion deal.

In fact, while a billion-dollar deal may take months or years to negotiate, in a previous life, Barclays and Lehman only took three weeks to negotiate.

On September 1, under the witness of the U.S. Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, he signed a formal contract with Lehman's current chief operating officer, H. B. Mike Dade, at Lehman's headquarters.

At this point, the 158-year-old Lehman Brothers officially fell, and their headquarters would become the U.S. headquarters of the traveling Nanyang Group, and it would also be the headquarters of the traveling financial sector.

Located at 745 Seventh Avenue near Times Square, spanning 49th and 50th Streets, the Lehman Brothers Headquarters Tower is a 32-story building covering an area of approximately 4,000 square meters and a floor area of more than 100,000 square meters. It was purchased from Morgan Stanley in 2001 for approximately $700 million. At the time, nearly $7,000 per square meter was the highest price in Manhattan.

However, the location is very good, less than 200 meters from Times Square, which belongs to the center of Manhattan. The overall ownership of such a building can be bought for less than $10,000 per square meter, which is not very cheap, but it is definitely not expensive.

Because the four floors of this building belong to the commercial area, it is designed as a shopping mall as a whole, and this shopping mall alone, 16,000 square meters of shops, has an annual rent of more than 40 million.

The upstairs office area, according to the average rent of the office building in the core area of New York, can reach 800 US dollars per square meter per year, if it can be rented out completely, the full cost can be recovered in more than ten years.

However, of course, this is just a fantasy, even if the location is good, it is impossible to rent out all the office buildings, not to mention that there is a public sharing area, and the operating costs are not counted.

But no matter how you calculate it, it can recover the cost in more than 20 years, and compared with the domestic investment that takes 40 or 50 years to pay back, the investment here is still relatively cost-effective.

Lehman's two data centers, one on the fifth basement floor of the building, and one near the University of Maryland in Maryland, are also home to Server D, one of the Internet's thirteen root servers.

There are only 13 root servers in the world, but 10 are in the United States, and the other three, the ninth is codenamed I in Stockholm, Sweden, the eleventh is codenamed K in London, England, and the thirteenth is codenamed M in RB Tokyo.

Although the development of the Internet industry in the mainland is in full swing, in fact, there is not even a root server in China.

Although the contract was signed, it means that the ownership of the building has already belonged to Zhou You. But Lehman hasn't moved out yet, and Zhou You has also given them a six-month handover period. In fact, half of them will become traveling employees by then.