| |||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||
The New York Times ran an obituary of Dennis Weatherstone, who died of cancer at the age of 77. The Times obit was pretty bare bones about Weatherstone, a sign of how quickly memories fade on Wall Street, but his story is remarkable. Weatherstone was a small, trim, self-effacing man but, in his time at the top in the '90s, a huge figure. The cliché about Weatherstone was that he was a man no one disliked. That was a slight exaggeration, but just slight. He was soft-spoken, precise and he moved like a cat (he loved tennis). He was unfailingly polite. But Weatherstone had -- another cliché, but appropriate -- a steely mind, particularly on matters of risk. For years he was a major figure on risk questions at the Bank for International Settlements and the various global risk committees; and as the Morgan CEO and chairman, he inherited the role of the first call from regulators when something was going terribly wrong in the markets. He was arguably the last House of Morgan chief to command that stature.
The other notable Weatherstone trait was his nationality and his class: He was an Englishman, born into the working class. He essentially reinvented himself into a Morgan banker. When Lewis Preston took over J.P. Morgan's London operations in the '70s, he discovered a relatively junior clerk who seemed to know everything going on in the branch -- a branch that was just beginning to fund itself through the money markets developing in Europe. Preston, who soon began talking of launching a broad-gauged project to transform J.P. Morgan from a commercial to a universal bank, found in Weatherstone the essential lieutenant and ally. When Preston returned to New York to take over Morgan, Weatherstone followed. On the boat over in June 1974, Weatherstone famously helped orchestrate the management of one of the first systemic risk crisis of the modern era: the failure of Germany's Bankhaus Herstatt, which sent shudders through commercial banking and gave a name to a key form of settlement risk, Herrstat Risk. This was classic Weatherstone. They made an unlikely pair. Preston, with his WASP lineage and glittering friends, was a formidable figure, a former Olympic hockey player and a man of few words. He could appear stern and remote, though those closest to him often said that frostiness belied a deep inner warmth. Weatherstone was more approachable, always well-versed in the details, but -- and again this came from colleagues -- more at ease than Preston at making cold, logical, often painful decisions. Weatherstone's ascension at Morgan was a sign of just how profoundly that deeply traditional institution was changing (and, for that matter, how Wall Street was changing). Preston was a traditional commercial banker trying to push the bank into the markets. Weatherstone was a true man of the markets, trying to build a machine at Morgan from scratch that could escape what the wisdom of the day saw as a trap for commercial banking. Preston now seems like a great figure, but one from an impossibly remote age. Weatherstone was Morgan's first man for the era we are now living through. It's a tribute to Preston that he recognized that, and a tribute to Weatherstone that he reinvented himself to meet the demands of the new age. An independent J.P. Morgan, of course, is gone now -- a part of sprawling J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. That story has its own abundant ironies. But by the time Weatherstone's successor, Sandy Warner, sold Morgan to Chase in 2000, Weatherstone had already slipped -- as always, smoothly and quietly -- into retirement, though his voice would occasionally be heard, again, on systemic risk issues. A pity he can't be heard today. - Robert Teitelman CategoriesComments
From: Don Reed,
I feel a sense of privilege in being able to read it - particularly after having first read the Times' lackluster & perfunctory account of the life of Dennis Weatherstone. Splendid, Mr. Teitelman. Thank you. And what a shame it is that this man's work and his values has been honored by so few people whose lives surely must have been richly enhanced by his contributions to their careers. Wall Street's amnesia is eternal, and incurable.
Posted on:
June 23, 2008 9:49 PM
 Deal Video
    Community
 Elsewhere on The Deal.comDealwatchThe Deal MagazineCorporate Dealmaker
The Deal VideoCategories
Blog roll
Archives
| |||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
Teitelman I love your writing