The US Labor Day weekend, the first one in September, is usually the last gasp of summer for Wall Street investment bankers, a time of lazing on the beach at their Hamptons homes as they store up energy for the gruelling autumn calendar ahead. Of course last year's holiday, coming on the heels of Russia's debt default and a near 20% drop in the Dow, was relaxing for no-one.
But few faced it with as much glee as James Lee, the Chase Manhattan vice-chairman who oversees the New York bank's global investment banking effort. "It felt just like 1990," says Lee, who told his troops to pull together everything they had done during that earlier period, when a similar flight to quality occurred. "Drexel exploded, highly leveraged transactions were investigated by the regulators, real estate collapsed and we went into a recession," he recalls.
Then, Lee and his team filled a void, providing bank loans when the junk bond and equity markets imploded. Their efforts became a turning point in the transformation of what was then Chemical Bank into the world's dominant syndicated loan house - and the building block for all the progress made in building the investment banking franchise since.