Then, she was rattled by the failure of another investment bank, Bear Stearns. “There are so many risk and credit controls within these institutions,” Roitman, now 50, said. “Unless someone is doing something wrong, how does something like that happen?”
The demise of the company cost her around $1 million in savings, she said.
She remembers thinking, “Now I have to start all over again.” Suddenly, she was worried about paying for her children’s college and if she’d have enough to retire. She had set her parents up with a Lehman fund manager, and they took a hit, too. She was insecure about the future and wondered, “If I could lose this job, what else could I lose?”
In the aftermath of the bankruptcy, she stayed on to finish out her clients’ deals. Since, she’s worked as a lawyer at a handful of smaller financial companies, where she says she makes half of what she made at Lehman. “I’ve never recovered,” she said.
Yet the financial loss, she said, was not the hardest one.
“What I lost was my identity,” she said. “Our business was done.”
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