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Just a few short weeks ago the President spoke to Wall Street CEOs on the anniversary of the Lehman Bros. collapse: Unfortunately, there are some in the financial industry who are misreading this moment. Instead of learning the lessons of Lehman and the crisis from which we're still recovering, they're choosing to ignore those lessons. I'm convinced they do so not just at their own peril, but at our nation's. So I want everybody here to hear my words: We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess that was at the heart of this...

The Subprime home mortgage collapse...a Primer. It's ALL about the CRA of 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 - This required banks to offer credit throughout their entire market area for “underserved” populations and small businesses. The CRA gave incentives to help low income borrowers become “home owners”. Liberals call this group “low income borrowers”. Conservatives call them a RISK!The CRA was passed by the Carter administration. In 1995 the Clinton administration authorized subprime loans under the CRA. Democrats added these provisions for the securitization of subprime loans and then ENFORCED the lending to high risk individuals. By 2000,...

Former Secretary of the Navy under Reagan, and member of the 9/11 Commission, John Lehman spoke tonight on the campus of St. Joseph's University. His topic was "The Lessons of 9/11: What we have learned, what have we accomplished, and what remains to be done."

Part of the charm of Wall Street, and what scares most reasonable people away, is that it is as close to a meritocracy as exists on this earth. It's dog eat dog. It's sink or swim. You do a trade and it makes money, then you're a hero (for a moment anyway) and deserve a bonus. You bring in a deal, you get paid. You lasso more clients' assets under your firm's roof, you're a hitter. I once discovered some good news on the stocks I followed before the rest of the Street, and mentioned it to the sales force...

If only. Lawrence McDonald begins his insider’s account of the fall of Lehman Brothers with seven “what if” scenarios, speculating on how different decisions might have saved his former employer. If only Dick Fuld, Lehman’s chief executive, had listened to those who warned of impending losses on the bank’s property portfolio. If only Fuld had not antagonised Hank Paulson, the then Treasury secretary. And so on.* Mr McDonald is far from the only person who believes that the Lehman bankruptcy could have been avoided. Alan Blinder, the former Federal Reserve vice-chairman, has called the decision to let the bank fail...

A BBC production of the last days of Lehman Brothers is a must see. You have to read between the lines a bit, but the production shows how Treasury Secretary Paulson treated Lehman different from the way he handled others that had just as many problems as Lehman. In a nice touch, the BBC hints that Paulson tipped off former Goldman man, and then Merrill CEO, John Thain, of the trouble ahead----which was behind Merrill's sale to Bank of America. The dramatization does a nice job of showing Thain's style in landing an incredible $29 per share for Merrill from...

Equities fell on Friday however all three indices were up for the week. They are looking to open however a bit less than one percent down this morning. According to CNBC, the lower opening reflects a trade dispute between China and the U.S. Stock index futures were pointing to a lower opening for Wall Street as investors worried over a trade dispute between the US and China and reflected on the one-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse.

Regulators today won't define 'systemic risk,' unlike 25 years ago. With Congress back in session and the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers failure upon us, the Obama Administration is resuming its quest for greatly expanded authority to bail out American businesses. Under the Treasury reform blueprint, any financial company, whether a regulated bank or not, could be rescued or seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation if regulators believe it poses a systemic risk. If recent history is any guide, when the feds stage their next intervention, they will not define "systemic risk" and they will refuse to release the...

On the eve of the one-year anniversary of Lehman's liquidation filing , the US President will on Monday warn that there remains much to be done to ensure the problems of the last 12 months do not happen again. Speaking just 10 days before the start of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh – at which world leaders are set to discuss curtailing bankers' bonuses among a raft of potentially restrictive reforms – he will also put the amount of capital banks hold on their balance sheets back at the top of the agenda, acknowledging that the demise of Lehman and...

You can see why markets and governments both like to blame Lehman Brothers for the "Great Contraction". Such wishful thinking shields investors from the nasty reality that deeper forces are at work: it absolves officialdom from its own destructive role in fixing the price of credit too low for 20 years, luring us into debt. As my colleague Jeremy Warner puts it, Lehman no more caused the economic convulsions of the last year than the assassination caused the First World War. There was the little matter of a rising Germany then, and rising China now. Both scrambled the international system,...

"Letting Lehman fail was perhaps the only thing governments have done right during this whole drama,". Rogers argues that the government's actions to rescue Long Term Capital Management ten years ago created systemic risk based on the assumption that the government would ride to the rescue. "Had the central bank allowed the failure of Long Term Capital Management to run its course, Lehman, Bear Stearns, et al would still be here,"

A year after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, questions still swirl around its collapse. Lawrence MacDonald, whose book A Colossal Failure of Common Sense came out in July 2009, maintains that the bank was not in substantially worse shape than other major Wall Street banks. He says Lehman was just “put to sleep. They put the pillow over the face of Lehman Brothers and they put her to sleep.” The question is, why?

The game was up. Gathered in a first-floor conference room at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a huddle of senior Lehman Brothers executives realised that their firm was bust. A last-ditch effort to get Barclays to buy the 185-year-old Wall Street bank had failed. The British were not coming. Bankruptcy was the only card left to play.

A breakdown in communications at the highest level between the US and the UK led to the shock collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers in September last year, a Guardian/Observer investigation has revealed. The downfall of Lehman, which triggered the biggest banking crisis since the Great Depression, came after a rescue bid by the high street bank Barclays failed to materialise.

As consensus builds that the recession is over, some are crediting Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s stewardship and all but re-nominating him by acclamation. But others worry that declaring the recession over is a tad premature. “I would be hesitant to declare the recession over while unemployment remains so dire,” said George Selgin, professor of economics at the Terry College of Business at UGA and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Even if the recession were ending, Selgin thinks it would be a mistake to credit the Fed with the recovery. (It’s not a religious...

Executives at Goldman Sachs sold almost $700m worth of stock following the collapse of Lehman Brothers last September, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Most of the sales occurred during the period in which the investment bank enjoyed the support of $10bn from the troubled asset relief programme. The surge in selling among Goldman partners, at a time when the US government had thrown a lifeline to Wall Street, is likely to draw criticism from lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Having survived the crisis, the bank is expected to report strong second-quarter earnings on Tuesday on rebounding trading...

> "What should the Navy look like? It should look like it can build ships," said Lehman, who led the service for six years in the Reagan administration. "They should sound like they know what they are doing and that it can execute the plan. That today, is not the case." >

BACK when he was a major Wall Street deal maker, Mark A. Walsh, the former head of the global real estate group at Lehman Brothers, had a running joke with Carmine Visone, one of his managing directors. Mr. Visone, 10 years older than his boss, would lecture Mr. Walsh about the importance of fundamentals: land values, construction cost and rents. Mark Walsh and Lehman Brothers financed blockbuster property deals in Manhattan, including the purchases of, from left, the Woolworth Building, the Seagram Building and Lever House. As Mr. Visone remembers it, Mr. Walsh would wave his hand dismissively and would...

<p>It turns out we were looking in the wrong place for weapons of mass destruction.</p> <p>They weren't in Iraq.</p> <p>They were in Lehman Brothers' portfolio.</p> <p>The bankrupt investment bank holds as much as 500,000 pounds of uranium yellowcake -- enough to make a nuclear bomb -- it was learned yesterday.</p>

Lehman Bros. has already set a record as the largest company ever to file for bankruptcy. Now, it’s on course to set a record as the most lucrative for lawyers, especially Harvey Miller and his merry band of lawyers at Weil Gotshal. In the largest quarterly fee request ever made by lawyers representing a bankrupt debtor, Weil earlier this week asked Robert Peck, a federal bankruptcy judge in New York, to sign off on a $55.1 million payment for its work representing Lehman. . . . The pace of the work during a bankruptcy is typically most intense during the...