What Lehman Brothers' failure means today
Lehman may not have been a particularly large bank, and it probably was not even insolvent when it failed. Nonetheless, it nearly took down the global financial system and triggered the Great Recession. Lehman was transformative because it fundamentally altered people's understanding of the world around them.
After September 15, 2008, the fear of "another Lehman" and a deeper financial catastrophe put the United States on the path toward wide-ranging reform. And Lehman was constantly invoked during the European financial crisis that erupted after 2010, highlighting fears of a "death spiral" stemming from state bankruptcies and defaults. Since then, the scare story seems to have lost its effectiveness. In the US, banking reforms are now being undone; and in the European Union, government debt-to-GDP (gross domestic product) ratios are well above where they were in 2008.
Still, for policymakers and opinion-shapers, the 2008 financial crisis produced three new grand narratives. First, after Lehman, the American economist Charles Kindleberger's 1978 masterful book Manias, Panics, and Crashes met with a newfound popularity. Kindleberger had drawn explicitly from the American economist Hyman Minsky's work on financial cycles, and his arguments were read as a warning against "market fundamentalism."
The second narrative was that Lehman's failure had made the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression newly relevant. Policymakers drew lessons from the interwar years, and successfully avoided a full repeat of that period. During the Great Depression, especially in Germany and the US, the prevailing attitude was that of then-US Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon: "Liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate." By contrast, the response during the Great Recession was to use public debt to replace insecure private debt - an intervention that would prove sustainable only as long as interest rates remained low.
The third narrative held that Lehman's collapse augured the end of American capitalism. This butterfly-effect story was popular in every country that was tired of being bossed around by the US. As Germany's then-finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, explained in September 2008: "The US will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system, not abruptly but it will erode."
At first, the 2008 crisis was widely regarded as a quintessentially American disaster, owing to the country's mix of testosterone-driven finance and penchant for promoting home ownership even for those who cannot afford it. Only gradually was it recognised as a truly transatlantic affair. As the economists Hyun Song Shin and Tamim Bayoumi subsequently show, badly regulated, oversized European banks played a key role in the build-up of risk throughout the financial system.
Neither of the first two popular narratives is really correct. The crisis was not a market failure, but rather the product of opaque, dysfunctional non-market institutions that had become perversely intertwined. It exposed the problem of complexity - not of markets as such.
——-
DREAM- Debt Rules Everything Around Me
Lehman may not have been a particularly large bank, and it probably was not even insolvent when it failed. Nonetheless, it nearly took down the global financial system and triggered the Great Recession. Lehman was transformative because it fundamentally altered people's understanding of the world around them.
After September 15, 2008, the fear of "another Lehman" and a deeper financial catastrophe put the United States on the path toward wide-ranging reform. And Lehman was constantly invoked during the European financial crisis that erupted after 2010, highlighting fears of a "death spiral" stemming from state bankruptcies and defaults. Since then, the scare story seems to have lost its effectiveness. In the US, banking reforms are now being undone; and in the European Union, government debt-to-GDP (gross domestic product) ratios are well above where they were in 2008.
Still, for policymakers and opinion-shapers, the 2008 financial crisis produced three new grand narratives. First, after Lehman, the American economist Charles Kindleberger's 1978 masterful book Manias, Panics, and Crashes met with a newfound popularity. Kindleberger had drawn explicitly from the American economist Hyman Minsky's work on financial cycles, and his arguments were read as a warning against "market fundamentalism."
The second narrative was that Lehman's failure had made the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression newly relevant. Policymakers drew lessons from the interwar years, and successfully avoided a full repeat of that period. During the Great Depression, especially in Germany and the US, the prevailing attitude was that of then-US Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon: "Liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate." By contrast, the response during the Great Recession was to use public debt to replace insecure private debt - an intervention that would prove sustainable only as long as interest rates remained low.
The third narrative held that Lehman's collapse augured the end of American capitalism. This butterfly-effect story was popular in every country that was tired of being bossed around by the US. As Germany's then-finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, explained in September 2008: "The US will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system, not abruptly but it will erode."
At first, the 2008 crisis was widely regarded as a quintessentially American disaster, owing to the country's mix of testosterone-driven finance and penchant for promoting home ownership even for those who cannot afford it. Only gradually was it recognised as a truly transatlantic affair. As the economists Hyun Song Shin and Tamim Bayoumi subsequently show, badly regulated, oversized European banks played a key role in the build-up of risk throughout the financial system.
Neither of the first two popular narratives is really correct. The crisis was not a market failure, but rather the product of opaque, dysfunctional non-market institutions that had become perversely intertwined. It exposed the problem of complexity - not of markets as such.
——-
DREAM- Debt Rules Everything Around Me
