How the financial crash helped FTI

THE GREAT crash of 2008 has been good to Jack Dunn, chief executive of US “event-driven” advisory firm FTI Consulting.

Be it within Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, Tribune newspapers, AIG, Northern Rock or Royal Bank of Scotland, the firm’s restructuring unit is deeply involved in efforts to clear up the fallout from the credit crunch.

At Lehman Brothers, FTI is acting for creditors whose exposure to the bank amounts to $1 trillion (€748 million). In AIG, it handles communications.

On a fleeting visit to Dublin to publicise FTI’s new sponsorship deal with champion golfer Padraig Harrington, Mr Dunn would not disclose the terms of the arrangement. Although it is assumed the three-year arrangement will be worth several million euro to Harrington, Mr Dunn simply said the deal “is a good thing” for the golfer.

That FTI’s annual revenues exceed $1 billion is suggestive of the resources at its disposal for such sponsorships. Mr Dunn was accompanied in Dublin by New York-based consultant Declan Kelly, well-known from his years in the public relations scene in Dublin and now an executive vice-president with FTI in New York.

While FTI is not currently involved in talks about the recapitalisation and restructuring of the Irish banking system, Mr Dunn said important lessons were to be learned from the decision of the US authorities to allow Lehman Brothers to fail. The “unintended consequences” of that decision led to five weeks of unbridled turbulence in which the landscape of Wall Street, and US capitalism generally, was redrawn.

This has had downstream effects within Irish business, he noted.

Mr Dunn was looking forward to Barack Obama’s arrival in the White House next month and was impressed with the appointments the incoming president had made to his economic team. Indeed, Mr Obama’s budget director, Peter Orszag, previously worked as an economist with FTI.

But while Mr Dunn said Mr Obama’s stimulus package – and his infrastructure plans – provided grounds for optimism, he did not concur with the view that US stock markets would soon reach the bottom of the cycle.