Andre Lee - Pioneering the Asian bond business

Were you doing anything different from other salesmen at international firms?

I began thinking about the business that Lehman - and for that matter all the other investment banks - was doing in Asia and whether or not that was really the business that should be done. Maybe as a 29 year old bond salesman I wasn't supposed to be doing that, but I did, and the conclusion I came to became evident to me one day when I was in Tokyo. I was having drinks with our US government bond trader and he was saying: "Why don't Asian customers buy more US government bonds and why don¹t they buy other products that we sell?" These were all Western products. I looked at him and said: "Well maybe they don't want to buy it, maybe they are buying a lot of other things that are Asian, maybe there's a better...