IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-137-52574-1_15.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Lehman Panic — An Avoidable Crash

In: Manias, Panics, and Crashes

Author

Listed:
  • Robert Z. Aliber

    (University of Chicago)

  • Charles P. Kindleberger

    (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Abstract

The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings, the fourth largest US investment bank, in mid-September 2008 triggered the most severe financial panic and crash in a century. Lehman had been an aggressive buyer of mortgage-related securities; the firm used the money that it obtained from selling its own short term IOUs to buy long-term mortgages. Every investment bank is highly leveraged, but Lehman was at the extreme end of the spectrum in terms of its leverage; its assets were more than thirty times its capital. At times, Lehman’s leverage may have been as much as forty times its capital; at the end of each quarter, Lehman engaged in ‘window dressing’ so that its reported leverage appeared smaller than the leverage that it had had in the previous several months.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert Z. Aliber & Charles P. Kindleberger, 2015. "The Lehman Panic — An Avoidable Crash," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Manias, Panics, and Crashes, edition 0, chapter 14, pages 313-339, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-52574-1_15
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-52574-1_15
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-52574-1_15. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.