City death: why so many moneymen kill themselves

31 January 2009

Matthew Lynn analyses the pressures that have driven a startling number of financiers and investors, hit by this and previous market crashes, to take their own lives

Among the many overused clichés that have been dusted off to describe the chaos in financial markets over the past few months is the observation that this is ‘a crisis like no other’. Yet in one rather dark respect, it is following convention to the letter. As losses pile up and billions evaporate, an increasing number of financiers have decided to take their own lives rather than face up to the scale of the catastrophe.

In Germany, the billionaire Adolf Merckle threw himself under a train as one of Europe’s greatest family fortunes unravelled. In this country, Kirk Stephenson took the same way out after his private equity firm ran into trouble. The French investment adviser Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, whom Taki described recently as ‘an aristocrat, a gentleman and an honest man’, but who had placed hundreds of millions of his clients’ money with the hedge-fund fraudster Bernard Madoff, locked himself in his office, took some sleeping tablets and slashed his wrists.

Christen Schnor, HSBC’s head of insurance, hanged himself in a suite at London’s Jumeirah Carlton Tower hotel, while Bear Stearns’ research supervisor Barry Fox took the most traditional way out by jumping from the 29th floor. Last week, Irish property tycoon Patrick Rocca, whose companies owned a number of prominent office buildings in London, shot himself while his wife was out on the school run.

When markets turn against them, it seems, financiers are swift to contemplate the ultimate closing out of their personal positions. Psychologists have even devised a word for them: ‘econocides’, people who take their own lives as a result of losing lots of money.

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Alfred T Mahan

January 31st, 2009 10:11am Report this comment

I think resilience is something you learn from personal experience and I'd be surprised if a course on it would work!

If you're going to be ultra-successful the chances are that you haven't coped with much failure or even adversity in your career, and you are probably more fragile as a result. It's quite common, apparently, for high flyers who lose their jobs to take it much worse than the rest of us mortals. It would be interesting to know whether the suicide rate is the same among those with a a well-to-do background as among those who rise from poverty to the top - my thought being that the latter may have learnt more resilience in childhood.

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