A Freddie Mac suicide
Today’s headlines bring us the sad news that:
David Kellermann, the acting chief financial officer of money-losing mortgage giant Freddie Mac was found dead at his home Wednesday morning in what police said was an apparent suicide.”
So Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa may have gotten his wish: a prominent CEO of a failing corporation has committed suicide. Grassley’s remarks were widely quoted when he suggested that executives of mismanaged companies—especially AIG—ought to “resign or go commit suicide.” Then he backtracked and said he didn’t mean it, of course.
I would wager that he didn’t, and that he regrets his remarks. But Grassley is not the only one who has been calling for blood and for heads on pikes, although he may have been the only one to do it literally. The Obama administration, for example, has been quite busy condemning the rich (except, of course, for the liberal rich) and CEOs. The atmosphere created has fanned the flames of public rage at the titans of business.
What of Kellerman himself? A respected 16-year veteran of the company, he was appointed acting head of Freddie Mac back in September, after it had failed and the government had taken over and ousted the previous executives. He is neither under suspicion nor investigation, however, so if anyone at Freddie should have felt guilty about wrongdoings, it’s hard to believe that that person would have been Kellermann. And yet he bore the brunt of the day-to-day stress of running the company and dealing with the government as well.
The NY Times offers these details about certain recent events in Kellermann’s life:
In recent weeks, according to neighbors and company officials, Mr. Kellermann had received a bonus of about $800,000….According to neighbors, Mr. Kellermann hired a private security firm after reporters came to his house to ask about his bonus.
…Mr. Kellermann was also involved in recent tense conversations with the company’s federal regulator over its public disclosures. Freddie Mac executives wanted to emphasize to investors that the company was being run for the benefit of the government, rather than shareholders.
The company’s regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Authority, had reportedly pushed to play down that language.
The article goes on to say that Freddie Mac’s former chief executive, David M. Moffett, “resigned last month after apparently clashing with the company’s regulator over compensation issues and independence.”
My guess is that this sort of businessperson vs. government regulator “dialogue” is not unusual in the companies involved in takeovers and bailouts. Part of the stress for CEOs may very well be the attempt to serve both masters, and the fact that government demands often conflict with the executives’ perceptions of their responsibilities to shareholders and employees.
But to be honest, I have absolutely no idea what really drove this particular suicide. I know nothing about Mr. Kellermann except what I read in the newspapers today: family man, good guy, full of integrity. The cause for Kellermann’s tragic suicide may remain a mystery even if we learn more about him—as (despite the presence of suicide notes and supposed explanations) so many suicides ultimately do.
As a general rule, executive suicides are multiply-determined; few people kill themselves solely for business reasons, or even because of stress, although these can absolutely be important contributing factors. But people react quite differently to the same circumstances; it depends very much on personality, past experience, and other issues in their lives that might be troubling them.
Unlike the Japanese society that Senator Grassley referenced in his remarks, where it is (or at least it used to be) culturally accepted or even expected that a disgraced executive might kill himself to retain his honor and that of his company, our society does not require this sort of act (Grassley’s remarks excepted), and even disapproves. Suicides in general remains relatively rare in this country, thank goodness, as compared to other nations such as Japan (as you’ll see if you look at this chart).
But that’s no consolation to the family of David Kellerman, who must be deeply traumatized and reeling from this loss, as well as the ensuing press scrutiny and notoriety. I offer them my condolences in this sad time.
What a sad story. When I read about it online this morning my first thought was that a faithful servant had been hounded to death by the impossible demands of the job, and the hopeless task of serving the insatiable requirements of the federal government and its rapacious representatives: grandstanding, witch-hunting publicity hounds like Barney Frank (who reminds me of nothing so much as a pair of those chattering, wind-up teeth) and Charles Grassley.
I’d been feeling hounded myself in recent days by the spectre of rising government debt, increasing taxes and energy costs, shrinking investments, tuition payments for our sons in college, and more…but our situation doesn’t have a patch on what poor David Kellerman must have gone through. I wish he could have hung on…and I’ll pray for him and his family.
How profoundly sad. My prayers and sympathy go out to his family.
I will acknowledge that I called for heads on pikes etc. To say otherwise would be a lie. However, there is no good reason to have thought ill of a man called to the wheel of an already sinking ship. I can only imagine what he must have gone through.
May Grassley find peace and happiness in the afterlife, and may God comfort his family.
This is a tragedy.
I hope this helps people cool down their rhetoric.
God bless David Kellermann’s family.
Are you blaming the people, Y-not? Blame Frank. Blame Dodd. Blame Kellermann’s predecessors who walked away clean with 90 million and 27 million each. Look at the committees involved with all of this. All democrats. Blame congress. They set all this crap in motion. None of them are suffering any consequences, they’re still calling the shots, and they are blaming everyone under the sun except themselves.
i thought that things were getting creepy..
after all, a good guy in the position they put him in would be a sitting duck with no way out without losing his moral bearing.
however, historically speaking its creepy. and depending on HOW it was done, it could be creepier. after all, what happened to Adrienne Shelly… if it wasnt for a footprint in the tub, they would have thought she hung herself.
so i am curious for more information.
as is clear, i seldom beleive any story straight out till more stuff develops, while i notice everyone talks as if everything said is the truth, and whats not truth is what they dont like or feel is right.
what about roberto calvi, remember him?
he was famously connected to finance, and such, and he was found hanging from the blackfriars bridge (with a brick in his pocket).
did calvi kill himself? no one seems to entertain that one…
if you read about the guy above, he was well liked, had problem with protestors, neighborhood iked him, good record, nice morals, fine career, good family, nice home, etc..
why didnt he just do like an obama appointee and walk away saying he wasnt going to handle this mess. he could have found another job.
there were TONS of conspiracy stories as to Calvi. who did it? did he jump hanging himself? one thread says mafia, since a mafia defector claimed so. maybe it was Opus Dei from spain? another line was that it was the KGB which recently (at that time) tried to murder the papal man.
he was ruled to have taken his own life by london police. follow up inquiries and such found that no one could prove it either way. he could have been hung, he could have committed suicide.
but when the banker for the vatican ends up hanging from a public bridge, things get creepy.
in this case, same kind of thing. ambigious, and a crisis connected to a lot of dirty players…
what i find interesting (but of course means nothing as no conclusion can be drawn from it), is that they refuse tos ay how they found the body in the basement. was it a gun wound? was he hanging from the rafters…
i looked up a few other articles in general, and they all say how things were found.. a woman was found hanging inside her closet… etc.. but not this guy (yet).
and dont think things arent happening in the US, remember Paul Joyal?
even a heart attack can be questionable in these circles.. when Peter Deriabin and Bogdan Stashinsky defected, they revealed that Stashinsky did some work with a tube with a chemical in it.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,874524,00.html
The reason why the deaths had not attracted special attention–one was put down as a heart attack, the other as suicide–proved bizarre.
While passing Rebet on the staircase of an office building, he pointed the six-inch aluminum barrel at Rebet’s face and pulled the trigger. Rebet toppled without a sound, and Stashinsky did not look back as he walked to a canal and dropped the weapon into the water.
everyone thought he died of a heart attack..
there are other cases, and i can find them and give names, where it was later found taht the suicide was not a suicide.
now, these other things technically have no clear bearing on this issue.
other than to point out that nothing can be sure, when there is so much happening and at stake.
we have no idea if he was going to walk, if he was going to squeel and show all the things going on because he was appalled. maybe he had a darker side and thought that he could get more out than others were willing to let him have.
or maybe he was so overwhelmed that he thought that suicide rather than monster or dice dot com, retirement, etc was no longer an option. (and thats what keeps bothering me). he wasnt caught in the scandal as a bad person, he wasnt being exposed with hookers or tax fraud, there was no criminal case on him, and no one was binding him as a slave to this.
[ok, if you need a suicide that turned out not to be then see Walter Krivitsky (samuel, or Schmelka ginsbert). found dead of a gunshot in a hotel room.
there are other” suicides,” the explanations of which usually arouse far more suspicion than they allay. A rash of them swept through the ranks of the Roosevelt administration in the first few years following the end of World War II; those of Harry Dexter White, Stephen Duggan and ex-Ambassador to England John G. Winant excited much curiosity.
and a tie to the same rooseveltian facts.. you can look up those names and see what we know.
then you can look up James Forrestall our first secretary of defense.. jumped from a window of a hospital while in care… there was also paul bang jensen, suicide note in pocket, in a ny park on thanksgiving.
yes i know that these are somewhat old… but remember the dates are the times tha ayers was getting hsi training and such. soits not as far back as it feels. and back then i could tell you nothing of what happened within a few years… so for more recent things, we will have to wait longer till the information gets out as it does eventually.
Jan Masaryk also seemed to fall from a window..
some we now know were not suicides, some we know are, and some are ambiguous.
but i am only adding something interesting to the conversation, that facts are not always facts. and that when things happen to people in these kinds of places, no one can be sure of anything.
look at the dhs napolitano thing… it was like they are angry that she didnt have the text denazified for public consumption, but they are not angry at the content, just how it was shown.
how much of a throwback is that? castro is still around… the ideology is still around, the totalitarians are still totalitarians…
so what has really changed. america is more like the soviet union than the soviet union became like america…
does that bode well for a clear knowlege in this incident?
to tell you the truth, i dont know, and its creepy and inconvenient.
by the way, i am playing devils advocate here, and not supposing that this is the answer. the idea is to move dicussion outside the clear cut lines in which no one acknowleges things that have been going on for decades on centuries and have never stopped.
br549: I have to agree with you. It is bad enough that all those grifters who gorged off Fannie and Freddie got away with it. Worse is the misery their actions have cast over peoples’ lives, most obviously Kellerman’s. May God have mercy on his soul and those of his family.
Maybe he knew too much, if you get my drift….
Neo, I followed your link to that suicide rate chart and the thing that struck me is that eight out of the top ten countries listed were part of the former Soviet bloc. Fifteen years on, communism’s death toll mounts.
Circumstances surrounding Foster’s suicide were strange.
Well, hell. The fact Bill and Hillary are still married is stranger still. I wouldn’t be married to a spouse as famous for being wayward as he is. Who would?
It’s strange how she dropped out of the race, disappeared for a while and came up as secretary of state instead of VP. I would love to have been a fly on the wall during those discussions.
Lot’s of strange things going on. Haven’t heard a word out of Bush since he hopped on the chopper and headed west. He has, literally, disappeared.
“Lot’s of strange things going on. Haven’t heard a word out of Bush since he hopped on the chopper and headed west. He has, literally, disappeared.”
My guess is this will be the case for quite some time – even if everything had gone swimmingly, both the left and right adored him, and he ended with 95% approval rating I bet this would have been the case. I never really could grasp why Bush Jr even ran for president – he never seemed to be comfortable with the power, comfortable with the pomp, comfortable with the position as a whole. Bush has even gone so far as to request his staff to stay low key.
I doubted Clinton would ever willingly release the spotlight and was right there too (indeed, he still grabs it with everything he has when the opportunity arises). Clinton loved the spotlight and the power and reveled in it, he never really seemed to like using it, just having it (Hillary, OTOH, seems to love using it).
As of right now I think Obama will too, I rather suspect that no matter how bad he does he will drone on endlessly to the next president how to do it. He is similar to Clinton in that I think he likes the trapping of celebrity and power more than using it, unlike Clinton I think he really doesn’t mind others using that power through him.
To bring this back around to the original post – that would also make pleasing the govt officials *really* hard as they do not even remotely have a coherent agenda you can try and achieve. Whomever has that position will never be successful simply because there is no path that leads to success. Obama’s administration is pushing the path of whoever the politician is who happens to have left his office last.
Pride has a lot to do with it, look for more shoes to fall from Freddie mac, reminds me of ADM Boorda, the most respected CNO in my lifetime:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Michael_Boorda
Look at the plight of Mr Kellerman as compared to Mr Blogojevich.
One hangs himself and the other wants to do the talk show circuit. This seems like Darwin turned on its head.
Mr. Kellermann, 41, began working nonstop, sometimes returning home only to change clothes, colleagues say. He was losing weight and telling friends that it seemed impossible to appease everyone – regulators, lawmakers, investors and other executives – given their competing demands. Someone was always angry with him, he told one friend. And no matter how many hours everyone worked, it seemed as if the economy and homeowners were still slipping farther into the abyss.
Then early this month, Mr. Kellermann and other executives at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae became the focus of intense scrutiny when lawmakers learned they would receive bonuses totaling $210 million. Mr. Kellermann was set to receive $850,000 over 16 months. Reporters and camera crews showed up at his home in Vienna, an affluent Virginia suburb of Washington. Fearing that someone might attack his house, his wife or their 5-year-old daughter, he asked the company for a security detail.
Early on Wednesday, Mr. Kellermann went to the basement of his brick home and hanged himself…
I appreicate Neo’s unwillingness to speculate about the causes of Kellerman’s suicide, but I find this passage from the NY Times article persuasive that current pressures from the economic crisis were instrumental in his decision to commit suicide at this time.
huxley “…I find this …persuasive that current pressures from the economic crisis were instrumental in his decision to commit suicide at this time.”
Yeah, I know just what you mean: I’m sure if I just received an $800,000 bonus, I’d at least be considering seppuku.
…for the appalling shame of my success.
/sarc
davis — If that’s how you measure success. I’m willing to believe that you are as mean-spirited as your sarcasm suggests.
if i was to try to give an honest assesment here, rather than broad including all otions, i would pick the fact that we cant stand ambiguous situations.
if requested i will hunt down the study (if i can), but the results were that given a situation in which tthere is angst and lots of anxiety in a holding pattern. people woudl select the worst option that was earlier than the later option that was better just to get the emotional situation over with.
this included suicide.
so rather than go to the canned bad lines of the lefts defintions of suicide which really dont match waht you see (women try more, men succeed more, but they are equally competent?)
yeah there is depressive suicide… and all kinds, but what you dont hear much about (because it woudl put men in a sad but positive light and so its not allowed since they are an oppressor group), is that there is also sacrificial suicide, and resoluition sucide.
i believe that he had both of these and none of the other. in one fail swoop, he saves his family and resolves the crisis he cant resolve witout going through it all.
no depression necessary. just a calcluated pragmatic situation.
my dad is kind of doing this now. he can retire, but he wont. he is working night shift as a line worker in a factory even though he is a engineer and artist. he plans to work till he drops to make sure my mom is ok since my family is long lived and we are all gone (i knew my greatgrandparents into my teens, and my last grandparent died in my 40s. my son is 21 and has spend his childhood with his great grandmother almost to adult hood).
so what is he doing? he is committing slow suicide as a sacrifice. what can we do about it? nothing unless someone licenses the tech they just stole from me, or i hit lotto and he knows or belives his wife will be ok. good thing insurance doesnt pay off on suicide, or else it would be a done deal.
yes he is in therapy, but there is really nothing to be said when pragmatism is this big. he is not mental. he is not selfish.
so i believe that he did it to save his family, preserve their money, eradicate the danger to them, remove the thing bringignd such danger to them, and relive the ambiguity of the outcome early.
in those cases this was the result of a rational calculating individual whose life was devoted to sacrifice for his families well being.
a father like mine and me cut from the old cloth.
unlike the ladies, the men really do live everthing for their family and take little for themselves. which is why malls are more than 3/4 women oriented as well as tv and such, even though men supposedly earn more.
like obama is teaching us that the feminists untaught us.
its not who earns the money with their labor who is the powerful one in the relatioships.
its the one who spends your labor that has power.
[so much for family dissolution being normallized and normal sacrifive and great selflessness becomes abnormal]
[do note that sociopathy could easily explain why blagovitch dont care, and this mand did. having no sense of guilt or fealty means that in our sociopathic piss cake new society, this dad was weak]
========================
on another note… the creepy aspect just went up… one is one thing, but they are starting to drop.
Apparent suicide at US Embassy in Berlin news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090424/ap_on_re_eu/eu_germany_us_embassy_suicide
and because of the CFO sucide, the original well connected prior person running freddie will be put back in place as a consultant.. (i wuold have been happier with a new person. its less creepy)
another femal in military commited suicide too (its high there for the ladies, they cant cope, but no one will admit that. in fact they will argue against it. but if you take the time to read the reports that are not news.. you will find out things like their breaking down and crying so bad they cant drive the truck and ahve to be replaced. their inability to carry enough reduces effectiveness, and they are bigger targets since injuring them is a means of getting all the men who will fulfill their biological imperiative that women are mroe important than they are (so feminsits are wrong we are not the same by a logn shot).
in fact suicides are at record level. between women who cant take it, adn men who are losing their families as divorces are now high and they cant go home (So the women are cleaning them out. big problem but you dont hear much about it).
and so much more going on too
There’s more to this story, we just haven’t got all the details yet. Something caused David Kellerman to snap. The question is what was it? What drove this man to end his life?
David’s 43,000 shares of stock in Freddie Mac had dropped in value from $395,000 down to $30,000. If we look back at 1929 and the years of the great depression, many people who lost fortunes in the stock market committed suicide.
I have personally lost my business, my wife divorced me and I have left with nothing more than a suitcase of clothes and started all over again. Not once, but three times.
Each time, years later, after the ex-wife had spent all the money, they have wanted to come back, but I have continued forward on my own.
I could relate to David Kellerman’s suicide if this had been the situation in his life, but it doesn’t appear that he had any problems with his wife.
There has to be something that pushed him over the edge and I believe it was something financial and he must have felt ruined as many who lost money in the stock market during the great depression.
It’s only money. You can always earn more money. You may have to do work at minimum wage, but you can find your way back to the top, one small step at a time.
If David Kellerman asked for security guards at his home, it had to be for a reason. He felt threatened and probably for good cause, we just don’t know all the details yet.