Lawrence McDonald Biography

One of the great risk managers, bond traders and business experts today, Larry McDonald is the only man from the inside of Wall Street who is permitted to speak about the disaster of Lehman Brothers. On the front-line of financial reform, Larry McDonald has written a book on the fall of Lehman Brothers, with Patrick Robinson, the #1 New York Times best selling author of Lone Survivor. A Colossal Failure of Common Sense – the Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers (Random House 2009) hit the New York Times bestseller list in its first week. It is now one of the bestselling business books in the world, translated into 12 different languages. Larry is President and Founder of McDonald Advisory Group is an asset management firm, specializing in Washington, DC policy research and trading, based in New York City.

Larry has been a guest and or contributor on CNBC, MSNBC, the New York Times, Fortune, CNN, CCTV China, France 24, BBC World, BBC America, Barron’s, Channel 4 News London, Bloomberg TV, Fox TV, Fox Radio, CBS, PBS Frontline and NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CBC News Canada, Business Week, The Economist, Die Zeit Germany, Tokyo TV, the Financial Times, Time Magazine, NPR, and the New York Post.

From July 2004 through September 2008, Larry was a Vice President of Distressed Debt and Convertible Securities Trading at Lehman Brothers. He ran an extremely successful joint venture between the firm’s fixed income and equity divisions. He was the most profitable trader on the convertible securities department 2006 and 2007.

In early 2006, Larry was part of a faction that called the subprime crisis, then he made over $46 million for the firm during its implosion. Larry was highly regarded as one of the most consistently profitable traders at Lehman with over $83 million in trading profits during his time with the firm. More interestingly, Larry was an integral part of a faction within Lehman Brothers that passionately tried in vain to stop the firm from heading down the road to destruction. Likewise, he also worked closely with Lehman’s credit derivatives team and saw first-hand the design and construction of what Warren Buffett termed as “Wall Street’s financial weapons of mass destruction.”

Before Lehman Brothers, Larry was Co-Founder of Convertbond.com, a website coined by Forbes Magazine as “Best of the Web” from 2000-2003, and was noted as the world wide web’s premier source for convertible securities information, valuation and news. In October 1999, before the dot-com crash, the site was successfully sold to Morgan Stanley and remains the property of the firm.

Larry also spent over five years as a successful retail financial adviser, helping individual investors build wealth, starting with Merrill Lynch in 1990 and working with firms like CitiGroup’s Smith Barney Division.

At the podium, Larry’s expertise takes audiences behind-the-scenes of Lehman Brothers’ collapse and it’s devastating ripple effect through the global economy. In his enlightening and up-to-the-minute speech, McDonald gives straight answers as a former Lehman VP and renowned financial expert—right from the belly of the beast. What happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail, with aftershocks that rocked the global economy? McDonald details the complexities of the collapse, assessing the current situation and providing unparalleled insight into the future of the global economy.

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