Dick Fuld tries to sell his NY apartment

Former Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld has put his Park Avenue apartment up for sale at a price 50 percent higher than when it was purchased two years ago.

Word is that many millions of dollars were plowed into it, which would make sense since early-2007 was about the peak of the late great, credit market orgy. Maybe, the government should think about making an offer and preserving it as some sort of a national monument, to forever remind the country of its early-21st century financial market idiocy.

This item at the Wall Street Journal provides some more details.

Lehman Brothers’ fall helped pop the Manhattan real estate bubble for good. But Richard Fuld, the investment bank’s former chief executive, is looking for a handsome profit on the co-op that he bought for $21 million in January 2007, according to a report in The New York Observer.

Mr. Fuld and his wife, Kathleen, are quietly listing the 6,200 square-foot apartment for $32 million, according to the Observer. Despite the big mark-up, one broker estimated that the apartment was in need of $10 million in repairs when the Fulds purchased it more than two years ago.

The Park Avenue apartment, which includes four servants’ rooms and five fireplaces, hasn’t been listed and is instead being quietly marketed, the Observer reporst. The listing, which comes less than a year after Mr. Fuld left Lehman without any severance pay, doesn’t come as a big shock in Manhattan real estate circles. “Everybody knows it, everybody’s just waiting for it to come on,” one broker told the Observer. “It’s not brain surgery.”

Mr. Fuld transferred a waterfront mansion on Florida’s Jupiter Island to his wife in January, prompting speculation that Mr. Fuld was worried about investor lawsuits. The couple hasn’t listed its Connecticut, Vermont and Idaho homes, according to the Observer.

Is the new gilded age really coming to an end, or is this just a setback?