At US investment bank Jefferies, the board of directors feared a crisis may be brewing every time chief executive Rich Handler visited Greece in August. Handler was hunkered down on a yacht there in 2007, when Wall Street was unwinding leverage in a precursor to the following year’s financial crisis, and again in 2011 in the early stages of the Eurozone debt crisis.
A decade later, he was on holiday in the Turks and Caicos Islands when he received a worried call from his head of equity trading about Jefferies’ exposure to what was then an obscure family office called Archegos.
