We asked our readers whether they thought Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld should fall on his sword in view of the difficulties currently being experienced by the firm. Your response was overwhelming, the result pretty decisive.

78.2% of all respondents said that they felt that Fuld should STAY

87.3% of Lehman Brothers employees who took part in the poll indicated that Fuld is the man to lead them through the firm's current troubles.

The financial markets establishment has also begun to rally around Fuld, with BlackRock President Robert Kapito telling Bloomberg Friday that: 'We have confidence in the firm, in the leadership. They have a history of being a team, a place of focus, of working out their situations, having confidence in the marketplace. They are trying their best to do that'. BlackRock confirmed earlier in the week that it had been buying Lehman shares.

Fuld made the news (again) last week by effectively demoting CFO Erin Callan and COO Joseph Gregory. Many feel that the Lehman boss had found a couple of fall guys to take the pressure off him. If that was the plan, however, it probably won't work. As The New York Times points out, Jim Cayne (Bear Stearns), Stan O'Neal (Merrill Lynch) and Chuck Prince (Citi) all fired senior executives because of their firms' difficulties, but that didn't make much difference to their own futures. In the end, they all lost their jobs too.

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