Curtis Welling Interview

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L.G.: You once told a reporter, "There were no people more self-important than investment bankers, including me." What does that mean?

C.W.: I do recall saying it, and I think it's true. I'm not sure I would say today there are no people more self-important. I think there is occasionally the politician and the corporate executive that rises to that level. But this is the Michael Lewis observation that when you take relatively young people and you expose them to the perquisites that one normally associates with wealth and power, and you give them amounts of money which by any other social perspective are the result of either a lifelong pursuit of something or inherent wealth, then people become very self-important. It's the old story about the guy who wakes up on third base and assumes he hit a triple. There are an awful lot of people in the securities industry that got swept up with this rising tide, and somehow believed that they'd earned it or they'd done something to deserve it or that it meant they were somehow superior or more insightful. One of the things that is a particularly poignant element of the contraction of Wall Street is a lot of these people were swept up into a position where they didn't acquire any transferable skills. And it's a long step from that step down to the next step, where they actually have to go compete in the real marketplace to do something that someone will pay them a wage for. I'm not sure I'm ready to conclude that the industry is going to become humble.

L.G.: Perish the thought!

C.W.: A lot of the self-importance has been washed away with the multiple houses and the planes and those kinds of things. You know, Lloyd, you could've made a small fortune, perhaps a large fortune, if you had said 12 months ago that by the end of 2008 there would be no major American investment bank left in existence, which is the case. We have only bank holding companies.

L.G.: Tell a complete ignoramus how I would've acted upon that to make my large fortune?

C.W.: Well, first of all you could've bet on it economically through any number of ways, but you would've become a celebrity savant. That would've been like saying, "I guarantee there will be a cure for cancer in 2008." It was inconceivable that firms like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley would either go out of business or would become bank holding companies. Just inconceivable. It's still very hard for people to process, and I think it's hard for those organizations. You're seeing this in the aftermath of this October debacle. They're still sort of groping for modus operandi in this new, more-regulated, less-leveraged environment, which presents a completely different set of economic opportunities.

L.G.: So at this point you don't envision AmeriCares as setting up free clinics for former Lehman Brothers employees?

C.W.: No, but if a Lehman Brothers employee without work, and without health insurance or was part of the working poor community in Connecticut, presented himself to our Norwalk or our Bridgeport or Danbury clinic, we'd give them the same quality of healthcare which we give to anyone else—and it's a very high quality indeed.

L.G.: Excellent. Tell me—at one point after you left your last position in business, and you were 51 years old, you were quoted somewhere as saying you were going to be working on polishing your golf game.

C.W.: That didn't last very long, as you'd well understand if you'd seen my golf game.

L.G.: You obviously made a decision that you'd made your fortune and that you were going to do something else. You were involved in your church. Tell me a little bit about your own process in terms of getting involved with AmeriCares.

C.W.: The seeds of this go back quite a while. I grew up in Rochester, New York, which is up on Lake Ontario and is certainly a more Midwestern community than it is a Northeastern community. And my parents and the people in our church and the people that we associated with had the old-fashioned value of community orientation and so on—the idea of being involved and the idea of philanthropy at some level. We didn't use that highfalutin term, it was just giving money to people who needed it. It was something that was always present in our family, so that was a fairly natural thing. So when I got to New York after graduate school, in fairly short order I began looking around for something to be involved in, became involved in a number of nonprofit organizations, one of which I'd chaired for 10 years, which is Spence Chapin, a spectacular adoption and child-service organization. I remember at one point, probably in the early '80s—I'd been pretty successful at First Boston at that point—I was up at Spence Chapin and we were doing some strategic work on setting up an adoption think tank. I went back to work thinking, Gee it would be fun to do this kind of thing full-time, and that was the first time I had the conscious thought that maybe at some point in the future, that would be a fun thing to do. That notion stayed with me and became more concrete as time went by, and I've said to a couple of people, everyone has a life list, whether it's well-defined and explicit or not, things you want to do. They made a movie out of this, with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson.

L.G.: The Bucket List.

C.W.: The thing about having the list is you have to start doing the things or you have to cross them off. So when I left Société Générale, where I was responsible for their investment banking activities in the Americas. I think that is when I made that observation about polishing my golf game, and I was sort of thinking about what to do next, and I was seduced by the internet like a lot of other people at that time and went to run this wonderful bill-payments company in New Jersey. Then after September 11th, when the world turned upside down, I stepped back and said well, you've got to make another conscious decision of what to do. If you're serious about this, you either ought to pursue it or you ought to cross it off your list. So I started to do the discernment and the networking, the investigation one needs to do to make that kind of continental shift in career and focus, and through a wonderfully serendipitous process about a year later, I found AmeriCares and was fortunate enough to be offered this job.

L.G.: It's obviously a charitable organization. It has an amazing ratio of overhead versus money to actual services. I think you're under 2 percent or something like that.

C.W.: Just under 2 percent goes to overhead and the rest goes straight into the field.

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