Sept. 15 is the 10th anniversary of Lehman Brothers declaring bankruptcy. It was a day after the global money markets seized up, turning a worldwide daisy chain of financial institutions into a ticking bomb. In the wake of the bankruptcy, it seemed likely that the United States financial system as a whole would cease to operate, a financial blackout that would render paychecks, credit cards, and ATMs useless.
Lenders, including large companies, financial institutions, and money market funds, suddenly hoarded cash in the face of growing losses and threats to their own sources of credit. They no longer knew which borrower was a good risk, so they treated all of them as bad risks.
The world experienced the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and the economy plunged into deep recession. The Federal Reserve and Treasury Department misjudged the scale of the fallout from Lehman’s bankruptcy.
The failure of Lehman Brothers started a chain reaction in financial markets, as it was the first true test of the “too big to fail” hypothesis. Whereas Bear Stearns was sold to JP Morgan in March 2008, Lehman failed to find a buyer in time. The federal government refused to provide financial assistance and the company was forced into bankruptcy. Lehman was the fourth largest investment bank, and its failure sent huge waves across global financial markets. Market volatility peaked, and for some time it seemed that no bank was safe.
Merrill Lynch, the third-largest investment bank, rushed to sell itself to Bank of America that same weekend. Even Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley felt the shock and quickly tried to raise capital. The Federal Reserve allowed those two banks to change their charters and become bank holding companies which facilitated their funding via the discount window at the Federal Reserve.
On September 16, the federal government rushed forward with an initial $85 billion in taxpayer cash to bail out AIG, the nation’s largest insurance company. The very next day the nation’s largest money market fund was forced to “break the buck”, that is, report a share value of less than a dollar. The firm’s stake in debt securities issued by Lehman Brothers, with a face value of $785, million was essentially worthless. As a result, the share value fell to 97 cents. (Gasp.)
In the biggest bank failure in United States history, federal regulators seized the assets of Washington Mutual, the sixth largest U.S. bank, on September 27. JP Morgan acquired Washington Mutual’s bank deposits, assets, and their troubled mortgage portfolio from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for $1.9 billion, making it the largest U.S. depository institution.
The crash brought together many forces: stagnant wages, widening inequality, anger about immigration and, above all, a deep distrust of elites and government. The road to recovery has been long for ordinary workers since those white-knuckle days of September 2008, resulting in a wave of nationalism, protectionism, and populism.
The ordinary American scraped by in the aftermath of the crisis, while Wall Street bankers soon returned to wealth and profitability, continuing their well-upholstered lives. The bankers were able to avoid accountability for the financial institutions they ran crashing the economy by trading trillions in fraudulent securities tied to risky or even certain-to-fail mortgages. No senior executive ever had to plea to criminal charges.
Policymakers and prosecutors took the view that prosecuting senior bank executives would cause too much collateral damage to employees, customers, other banks, and the economy. In 2013, then-Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was “concerned that the size of some of these (financial institutions) becomes so large that it… become[s] difficult… to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that… if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.”
In short, they were too big to jail.
Originally Published: September 8, 2018
