The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the fourth most influential US investment bank at the time, was the financial institution who generated a global financial crisis nine years ago.
The first major collapses from the capital markets began ten years ago, on August 9, 2007, when BNP Paribas, France’s largest bank, suspended the withdrawals from two real estate funds motivating that they could not properly assess assets.
But the origins and elements that attracted the pandemic that would change the world a year later were even older, because it was not just a real estate bubble.
The whole financial system had suffered a mutation that many ignored, and the regulations that should have held back the potential excesses have been overtaken for many years.
It was more about the so-called shadow banking and the so-called saving glut, represented by the surplus savings generated by the surplus recorded by the major exporting countries, which often canceled the intentions of monetary policies.
Although individually, many investors or business people have lost colossal fortunes, statistically speaking, the rich from then are richer now, while those who were poor before the Lehman disaster are even poorer today.
The US Stock Exchange has increased by 99% since September 15, 2008.
After the 1929 crisis, the Dow Jones index of the overseas capital market outperformed the October 29, 1929 quotation, the time of the worst stock market crash, but only in the mid-1950s to ten years after the war was won by the United States.
Life has made Ben Bernake, an economics professor from the Princeton University, an expert in studying the Great Depression in 1929, to led the American Central Bank during the turmoil that began ten years ago and expired a year later Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.
Lehman Brothers, a bank founded in 1850 by three Jewish brothers from Bavaria (Henry, Emanuel and Mayer), was initially specialized in financing cotton trade, which was dominated by the economy of the southern United States at that time.
In the early 1900’s, Lehman began to offer services that were to be defined later as investment banking and helped finance industries that would make America the world’s greatest superpower over half a century.