(2008-10-07) — Officials at bankrupt Lehman Brothers immediately disavowed a statement allegedly drafted by CEO Richard Fuld which apparently had been prepared for delivery to Democrat Rep. Henry Waxman’s House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee on Tuesday.

Revelation of the document comes after Mr. Fuld’s appearance yesterday at a committee hearing, during which Rep. Waxman portrayed Lehman Brothers as “a firm run by irresponsible leaders who continued to reward executives and spend billions on stock buybacks and other capital-depleting programs even as internal documents warned about the impending crisis,” according to a report in The New York Times.

Despite the company’s denial that Mr. Fuld penned the speech, and the lack of evidence regarding its origin, the text has been circulated on the internet, and responsible journalists have therefore felt compelled to publish excerpts like the ones found below.

MR. FULD: “Mr. Chairman, yesterday I spent several hours looking up your nose as you looked down it at me. You accused me of running an irresponsible organization, lacking accountability. You said our leaders care about little else than their longevity, and increasing power. You said we ignored the warning signs of impending financial collapse while we secretly lined our own pockets.”

“Mr. Chairman, I’m afraid your aides may have misinformed you. For the record, I am merely a CEO of a Wall Street firm. I am not, and never have been, a member of Congress.”

“As CEO, I’m accountable to our stockholders, to our customers and to a legion of regulators that Congress has appointed to assure we comply with the law. If I perform my leadership duties well, my years of sacrifice and hard work will pay off in ways only dreamed of in most of the rest of the world. My success is measured in strict terms by the success of our clients and of our stockholders. If I fail to produce satisfactory results, or if I succeed but do so illegally, I will be fired and perhaps fined or marched off to prison.”

“On the other hand, Mr. Chairman, if you and your colleagues fail, you atone for your crimes by extracting more money from us, the American people, which you then use in ways designed to get you re-elected. The fact that incumbency is nine-tenths of victory gives testimony to the effectiveness of your self-serving system.”

“You hold hearings on the pretense of gathering information to help solve problems, but these hearings are really just a platform from which you look down on people who make this country work in order to find scapegoats to deflect attention from your own malfeasance.”

“Each year, I’m responsible to issue a detailed report of all of our business dealings to everyone who has a stake in the company, as well as to the federal agencies which oversee our industry and which answer to you in the Congress. Our books are audited by a third party, and our deals are scrutinized by attorneys, regulators, and sometimes by the courts, to assure that we comply with the vast and growing array of regulations through which the Congress has attempted to create desirable social outcomes by manipulating our formerly-free markets.”

“You, in the Congress, have no such mechanisms to ensure fair dealing or administration of justice in cases of corruption. You are the unwatched watchdogs, pretending to guard the master’s house while gobbling up everything in his pantry.”

If you’re truly interested in determining what went wrong and spurred this financial crisis, may I recommend a good book to you? This book contains an exhaustive account of the misdeeds that resulted in millions of mortgages being issued to under-capitalized borrowers. This book explains why and how Government Sponsored Enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were allowed to package these bad mortgages and call them ’securities’ when they should have been called ‘vulnerabilities’. And this book will help you understand why regulators overlooked the red flags as they waved the banner of affordable housing. This book I commend to you, Mr. Chairman, is called ‘The Congressional Record‘.”

“I pray that you, and most of your colleagues, will soon have a great deal of downtime on your hands during which you may peruse this instructive text.”