In Greed and Glory on Wall Street , Ken Auletta's book about the last time Lehman Brothers collapsed, in 1984, Richard Fuld appears as the fierce, proud, introverted head of bond trading. Even at the end, after internal feuding had brought the firm to a halt, he resisted the idea that it had to be sold.

In the end it was sold to American Express and Dick Fuld later became its chief executive. He reformed Lehman as an independent bank in 1994 and never appeared to look back, defying the sceptics who said Lehman would always remain in the shadow of Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs.