Max Abelson has talked to three former Lehman executives about the Valukas report, and you can see why they requested anonymity. Here are some of the gems from Senior Executive #2:

...

The only people who would worry about using an old trick to reduce leverage from 13.9 to 12.1, the second executive said, are "yappers who don't know anything."

The was lots of talk in the early months of the Obama administration about whether Wall Street bankers really Got It or not -- whether they had any comprehension of the amount of justifiable anger in the country and the world that was arrayed against them. Clearly, they don't. ...

... "$50 billion is a drop in the ocean."...

The former managing director in London said that Repo 105 was an open secret there, if it was a secret at all. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. In Europe, people just generically talk about it. It's funny, for nonprofessionals, you can try to make it a smoking gun," the source said, "I'm like, whatever."

But it's important not to lose sight of the fact that what we're seeing here is a corporate failing to an even greater degree than it is an individual one, and that it infects investment banks generally, not just Lehman Brothers. These shops deliberately go out to hire psychopaths, and then they fire the ones who go soft, while promoting the most aggressive assholes, keeping a few smooth-talking client-relationship types on hand to preserve some semblance of a respectable public face.