Never Forget 9/11. But Bring on the Chaos.
June 1, 2010
Howard Lutnick is one of the savviest folks on Wall Street. He famously lost 658 members of his staff at Cantor Fitzerald on September 11, 2001. The saddest: the fellow he fired the day before who came back to pick up his things.
That was a defining moment. For his firm, it took 47 hours of crash technical work to get its famous eSpeed bond trading platform back up and running. For the rest of Wall Street, it was worse. It was chaos. The New York Stock Exchange did not open for business again until September 17.
Nine years later, Lutnick has rebuilt the firm as BGC Partners, a voice and electronic brokerage with offices in 20 cities around the globe, operations in multiple asset classes and $1.2 billion in annual revenue.
And he loves chaos.
Here's the unscripted Lutnick, from BGC Partners' investor and analyst day Thursday at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Battery Park.
"What is our business?
"We are an intermediary, a middleman. We don't make money when the markets go up, we don't lose any money when the markets go down. We're all about volume. How is business today, how is business yesterday. It's really great when spreads widen out, that's not bad. When spreads dramatically tighten, that's not bad, as long as they are all moving around. What's the worst thing we could say? Friday, it's August and it's boring. That's bad.''
"Chaos. Right? Chaos, crisis, risk. You name it. If it's on the cover of the newspaper and it has to do with finance, that's good.
