The Blame Game
Bloomberg Businessweek|September 17, 2018

Ten years after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, new books about the era largely point the finger at two men.

Arianne Cohen
The Blame Game

The Fed and Lehman Brothers: Setting the Record Straight on a Financial Disaster

In 2008, Federal Reserve officials gave many reasons why they were unable to save Lehman Brothers—the bank’s collateral was inadequate, they lacked legal authority—but the result wiped out an institution with $619 billion in assets, the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history. In this book, Laurence M. Ball, an economist at Johns Hopkins University, seeks to discover why it was singled out to fail. Number to know: Ball determines that an $84 billion loan—$1 billion less than went to AIG—would have kept Lehman solvent for months. The villains: Then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner. Ball makes a convincing case that the duo simply chose not to rescue Lehman. Paulson, in particular, didn’t want to be known as “Mr. Bailout.”

Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi

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