Quotes & Sayings About Lehman Brothers

Wall Street banks have used the same tactic that Bush used in the war on terror - fear - and they've basically said that if you don't do what we tell you, the sky will fall. If you don't do what we tell you, it will be the end of capitalism as we know it. The failure of Lehman Brothers lent some credence to those fears. — Joseph Stiglitz

Not at Lehman Brothers, which collapsed in 2008, and not on Wall Street; Greece was where the fire broke out. One heard the word contamination again and again, but this time it was no imperial cultural contamination, no creeping process of civilization. This time the crisis was a contagion: debts and obligations that would never be repaid, a gradual deterioration of the financial immune system. — Jason Wilson

gamble in a wartime prison camp should serve as an example to the staff of the World Bank today. We'll discover what the disasters at Three Mile Island and Deepwater Horizon have to tell us about preventing another Lehman Brothers crisis. We'll learn from a watchmaker, — Tim Harford

The assumption that Washington could and would resolve Lehman Brothers without a bankruptcy, as it had Bear Stearns, was the single biggest mistake in the series of mistakes in 2007 and 2008 that led to the financial panic and the ensuing epidemic of job losses. — David Malpass

What went wrong? Well, comrades, when the American investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, it was not just a bank going broke, it was a political ideology going bankrupt. The failure of market liberalism. It ended decades of naive, uncritical faith in the market looking after itself. It does not! — Asne Seierstad

The dirty little secret of what used to be known as Wall Street securities firms-Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns-was that every one of them funded their business in this way to varying degress, and every one of them was always just twenty-four hours away from a funding crisis. The key to day-to-day survival was the skill with which Wall Street executives managed their firms' ongoing reputation in the marketplace ... — William D. Cohan

But there's a difference between an old-fashioned financial panic and what had happened on Wall Street in 2008. In an old-fashioned panic, perception creates its own reality: Someone shouts "Fire!" in a crowded theater and the audience crushes each other to death in its rush for the exits. On Wall Street in 2008 the reality finally overwhelmed perceptions: A crowded theater burned down with a lot of people still in their seats. Every major firm on Wall Street was either bankrupt or fatally intertwined with a bankrupt system. The problem wasn't that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to fail. The problem was that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to succeed. This — Michael Lewis

Lehman Brothers' Repo 105 program - which temporarily moved billions of dollars of liability off the bank's books at the end of each quarter and replaced them a few days later at the start of the next quarter - was intentionally designed to hide the firm's financial weaknesses. This was a carefully crafted fraud, detailed by a court-appointed Lehman examiner. But no former Lehman executive ever faced criminal prosecution for it. Contrast this with the fact that a teenager who sells an ounce of marijuana can be put away for years. — Robert B. Reich

Value #1: Reality Huh? Isn't every business based on reality? In fact, isn't everything based on reality? Actually, no. Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, AIG (American International Group), IndyMac, Washington Mutual, Countrywide, and all the other banks that blew themselves to smithereens in 2008 weren't basing their businesses on reality. They were basing their businesses on sheer fantasy, wish, and whim - and an unhealthy dose of greed, the most unrealistic thing of all. They believed the housing market would always go up. Credit markets would never be illiquid. People with no jobs could pay back their mortgages. — Donald Luskin

What the American people don't understand is how Merrill Lynch or AIG or Lehman Brothers can reward people, and the entity fails. Not only do the shareholders lose, but the entities lose. — Richard Grasso

Most of the time, your risk management works. With a systemic event such as the recent shocks following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, obviously the risk-management system of any one bank appears, after the fact, to be incomplete. We ended up where banks couldn't liquidate their risk, and the system tended to freeze up. — Myron Scholes

I never once considered that it was appropriate to put taxpayer money on the line in resolving Lehman Brothers. — Henry Paulson

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. — Lou Jiwei

Hey, guess what? Turns out the free market? Not so free. Wall Street was hit hard Monday when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America, and insurance giant AIG neared a collapse of its own. Basically, if your commercials air during golf tournaments, you're done. — Amy Poehler

I often say to entrepreneurs, 'If Lehman Brothers were Lehman Brothers & Sisters, it wouldn't have gone into bankruptcy.' — Shinzo Abe

We cannot allow the bankruptcy of a euro member state like Greece to turn into a second Lehman Brothers. — Wolfgang Schauble

Barclays Bank in England purchased bankrupt Lehman Brothers Tuesday along with its Manhattan tower, saving nine thousand jobs. It's humiliating. The United States of America is 232 years old and we're having to go to mom for money. — Argus Hamilton

I don't feel like a wealthy person. Other people think of me as a wealthy person, but I don't. I feel the same as when I was a fifth-year associate trying to make partner at Lehman Brothers. I haven't changed. — Stephen A. Schwarzman

This crisis has the potential to be a lot worse than Lehman Brothers. — George Soros

Most people understand that Lehman Brothers didn't collapse because Gordon Brown built too many schools and hospitals. — Douglas Alexander

Who, in 2007, would have thought that a drawing by Willem De Kooning would be a safer asset than shares in Lehman Brothers? By autumn 2008, this would clearly be the case. — Sarah Thornton

Now we are intimately locked together. You get swine flu in Mexico; it's a problem for Charles de Gaulle Airport 24 hours later. Lehman Brothers goes down; the whole lot collapses. There are fires in the steppes of Russia; food riots in Africa. — Paddy Ashdown

If Lehman Brothers had been a bit more Lehman Sisters ... we would not have had the degree of tragedy that we had as a result of what happened. — Christine Lagarde

A Fed loan to Lehman Brothers would not have prevented a bankruptcy. — Henry Paulson

While we're talking about votes, Bernie Sanders is one who voted to deregulate swaps and derivatives in 2000, which contributed to the over-leveraging of Lehman Brothers, which was one of the culprits that brought down the economy. — Hillary Clinton

I wasn't on the board of Lehman Brothers. I was a banker, and I was proud of it and I traveled the country and learned how people make jobs. — Sean Hannity

I presumably lost $150,000 in the depression of 1937 - on my one stock investment - because I did everything Lehman Brothers told me. I said, well, this is a fool's procedure ... buying stock in other people's businesses. — Studs Terkel

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. — Robert Kiyosaki

The failure of Lehman Brothers demonstrated that liquidity provision by the Federal Reserve would not be sufficient to stop the crisis; substantial fiscal resources were necessary. — Ben Bernanke