Lehman Brothers has enough uranium to build a nuclear bomb

Posted By Annie Lowrey Wednesday, April 15, 2009 - 12:56 PM Share

Bloomberg reports that the holding company for collapsed New York investment bank Lehman Brothers is hanging on to a valuable asset until prices rebound, to help pay off the company's creditors.

The asset? Uranium. How much? Enough for a bomb, if you knew how to do it.

Lehman, once the fourth-largest investment bank, has an estimated $200 billion in unsecured liabilities left to pay. The uranium, which may be as much as 500,000 pounds, might fetch $20 million at today’s prices of about $40.50 per pound, said traders who asked not to be named because of the confidential nature of the data. Marsal said the traders’ estimate of Lehman’s uranium holding is “reasonable,” while declining to be more specific....

Lehman “tested” the uranium market after its bankruptcy filing in an effort to raise cash, pulling back after it did because “everyone was low balling,” Marsal said. With $10 billion in the till today from other asset sales, Lehman isn’t in a hurry any longer to sell uranium, he said.

“We plan on gradually selling this material over the next two years,” he said. “We are not dumping this on the market and have no fire-sale mentality.”

Goodness.

EXPLORE:NORTH AMERICA, BUSINESS, FINANCE, FINANCIAL CRISIS, NUKES, SECURITY
 

DJYSRV

2:30 PM ET

April 15, 2009

re; Lehman and uranium

The Bloomberg article really leads people astray. As many readers know, yellowcake is not weapons grade mateial. The uncritical acceptance of the article by NY Times Dealbook also creates problems.

Now the question is this - what is a reference to bomb making doing in an article about Lehman Bros. and its bad business decisions? Even more to the point, the uranium is stored in Canada, not Russia.

The reference in the Bloomberg article to the yellowcake inventory and its potential use in making a nuclear bomb appears to be an unfortunate effort to sensationalize an otherwise dull story about bad business decision making in a down vector commodity market.

For the rest of my remarks see the URL below
on Idaho Samizdat; a blog about nuclear energy

http://djysrv.blogspot.com/2009/04/bloomberg-bombs-on-uranium-story.html

 

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