Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy Examiner Anton Valukas ’65 Discusses Case in Lawrence University Presentation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the court-appointed examiner in the bankruptcy case of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., 1965 Lawrence University graduate Anton “Tony” Valukas had an insider’s look at one of the reasons the country teetered on the brink of financial crisis in 2008. Valukas, chairman of the Chicago law firm Jenner & Block, returns to his alma mater to discuss his involvement in what is believe to be the largest bankruptcy case in U.S. history Thursday, April 7 as part of the college’s Lawrence Scholars in Law program. He presents “Lawrence University to Lehman Brothers: A Journey” at 5:30 p.m. in the Warch Campus cinema. The presentation is free and open to the public. A specialist in civil and white collar criminal litigation, Valukas spent more than a year searching through virtually every e-mail message at Lehman Brothers in search of evidence implicating a cover-up involving the accuracy of valuations on Wall Street that contributed to country’s financial meltdown. In March, 2010, Valukas released a 2,200-page document detailing the inner workings of Lehman Brothers that indicated the firm’s financial books were manipulated through an accounting tactic known as “Repo 105.” The strategy involved “selling” assets, usually government securities, to another firm in exchange for cash, and then repurchasing them several days later. The values of the sold assets were typically 105 percent of the cash Lehman received in exchange. According to Valukas’ report, Lehman Brothers was able to reduce its net balance sheet through its Repo 105 practice by more than $138 billion between the fourth quarter of 2007 and the end of the second quarter of 2008. The report concluded that while Lehman’s directors should have exercised greater caution, they did not cross the line into “gross negligence” and Lehman’s demise was more “the consequence than the cause of a deteriorating economic climate.” A former United States Attorney (1985-89), Valukas has been lead counsel in a wide variety of matters relating to government contracts and issues of fraud and compliance and has extensive experience in representing clients in SEC investigations and in civil securities fraud lawsuits. He joined Jenner & Block in 1976. After earning a bachelor’s degree in government at Lawrence, Valukas earned his J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law in 1968. Launched last fall as a complement to the Lawrence Scholars in Business initiative, the Lawrence Scholars in Lawprogram brings alumni experts who have been highly successful in their careers to campus to share their experience and advice with current students.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".