Quotes About Lehman

In 2005 two thirds of the mortgages contained in Lehman's issuance of $133 billion in MBS/CDO were sourced from its own subprime loan originators. A top Wall Street name was scraping the very bottom of the credit barrel.

The blowback against a bailout of Lehman would have been fierce. It is often forgotten, but the prevailing wisdom the day after Lehman fell was that its collapse was a good thing.

The failure of Lehman may have allowed the government to do more to prop up the economy than it otherwise could.

The first of the brothers to leave their home in search of fortune was Henry, then twenty-three and the oldest. Henry settled in this city of 4,000 citizens and 2,000 slaves. His two brothers soon followed, and in 1850 they established a trading and dry-goods business called Lehman Brothers.

In 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, we anticipated that Europe was going to have a very different bailout scheme than the U.S. because of their different political systems and different relationships between the central banks and the fiscal authorities.

In our equities business, 49 of the 50 most important Lehman clients are back doing business with us. The flows are 75 to 80 per cent of what they were prior to the bankruptcy. The issues which damaged Lehman were around commercial mortgages and illiquid private equity assets.

No one suggested Lehman deserved to be saved. But the argument has been made that the crisis might have been less severe if it had been saved, because Lehman's failure created remarkable uncertainty in the market as investors became confused about the role of the government and whether it was picking winners and losers.

I read 'How to Rig an Election.' Well, I read parts of it. I wouldn't necessarily quote me as saying I read the whole thing.

The subprime disaster was a result of financial bombs - derivatives - exploding in financial institutions such as AIG and Lehman Brothers, as well as banks and financial institutions throughout the world.

were growing increasingly skeptical of Lehman's judgment of the value of its holdings.

Given the seriousness of the threat posed to global financial stability by a Lehman bankruptcy,

We would be left holding Lehman's bad assets, having selectively bailed out the creditors who could exit the most quickly, and the firm would fail anyway.

There was also substantial sentiment at the meeting in favor of holding our fire until we had a better sense of how the Lehman situation would play out.

Did the government make a conscious decision to let Lehman fail, and, if so, why did it go on to save AIG?

Unlike AIG, which had sufficient collateral to back a large loan from the Fed, Lehman had neither a plausible plan to stabilize itself nor sufficient collateral to back a loan of the size needed to prevent its collapse.

Lehman's condition was probably worse than reported at the time,

that letting Lehman go was a choice rather than an unavoidable outcome.

But we had agreed in advance to be vague because we were intensely concerned that acknowledging our inability to save Lehman would hurt market confidence and increase pressure on other vulnerable firms.

Today I wonder whether we should have been more forthcoming, and not only because our vagueness has promoted the mistaken view that we could have saved Lehman.

Would it have been better for market confidence to have admitted that we were unable to save Lehman?

Nevertheless, I do not want the notion that Lehman's failure could have been avoided, and that its failure was consequently a policy choice, to become the received wisdom, for the simple reason that it is not true.

But before Congress had an opportunity to give serious consideration to these issues, Lehman had failed,

That plane's dustin' crops where there ain't no crops.

My Lehman interview was representative not just of my own experience, but of thousands of interviews conducted by a dozen investment banks on several dozen college campuses from about 1981 onwards.