Never mind who dies in the new Harry Potter book – the literary subject inspiring the most avid speculation is what was in David Glenn’s diary.
The board of Freddie Mac requested the diary of Glenn, ex-president of the mortgage company, as part of an internal investigation into accounting irregularities at Freddie.
Glenn dragged his heels with the investigation, and eventually handed in a diary out of which several pages had been ripped. Presumably it was quite easy to spot – “Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday” etc.
As a result the board fired him last month, forcing the resignation of the CEO and CFO too. Their dismissals knocked around $7 billion off Freddie’s market capitalization, as investors worried that another Enron-style meltdown was on the way.
That danger appears to have passed, but one question remains weirdly unanswered by Freddie Mac: what was in the diary that was so terrible that Glenn had to sacrifice his job and Freddie’s share price to conceal it?
Freddie, like JK Rowling, doesn’t want to give the plot away. Freddie officials say they are completely ignorant of what was in the diary. As Douglas Robertson, spokesperson for Freddie, says: “We don’t know why he did it. His motivation was his own.”
Robertson could reveal that the missing pages were nothing to do with Freddie accounting issues, but contained “personal notes and recollections”.
Euromoney thinks it has the answer: Glenn was a secret Romantic poet. Behind his steely financial exterior, he was scrawling torrid lyrical odes, perhaps even while in boardroom meetings.
Ashamed to reveal his deep and sensitive nature to the board, he resigned, and retreated to a dusty garret to smoke Turkish cigarettes and read Baudelaire.
Glenn’s lawyer declined to confirm or deny our hypothesis, and until Freddie Mac comes out with more information, we shall know no more. However, the market seems to have refound its comfort zone with Freddie, share prices have risen, and bond spreads have tightened. And if the board wants to make back some of the money it has lost, perhaps it should sell Glenn’s diary to a publishing house. Surely many readers would be curious to see what it contains.
