Barclays just pulled out of talks so it's now looking very likely that Lehman Brothers might actually be put up for liquidation.

This is a pretty big deal. for those not familiar Lehman Brothers is the 4th largest IB in the US and it's been around for over 150 years. They have a large exposure to the credit markets through debt instruments called CDS contracts, so if they go under then there could be some big moves in the market tomorrow as other banks have to reevaluate their positions with respect to outstanding contracts and a whole lot else. Even the markets for commercial real estate could be affected if Lehman has to unload their assets on the market.

If the Fed steps in then Bank of America might decide to come through, but that's the only way it's going to happen after they bought LaSalle Bank (ABN AMRO) for $21 billion...

Thoughts on this? The Fed could use their liquidity support to sustain operations for a short time but they're wary of doing so after Bear Stearns (as they should be).

Guess who just filed for chapter 11.

Time for the taxpayers to keep the fuckup investors in sharp suits I guess...

Capitalize profits and socialize loses.

The best regulation of the market place is to let these firms fail. You can bet your ass nobody will do what they did again.

It's too bad that when you let these firms fail, you do the same for all the 401ks. It's a nice racket that wall street has going.

Could the 401Ks not be supported, while letting the rest of the company go on unsupported?

They dug their grave, let them lie in it.

Bullshit. Nobody was thinking "the gov. will bail us out if we fuck up". No. Everyone down the line had the go-ahead from the guy below (or above). From the new family buying a loan pushed by a lending giant to the mortgage packagers receiving every green light that these were mortgages just as stable as they had always been, to Fannie and Freddie, who could only rely on information from the credit rating agencies, which was all positive. No, not even close. After decades of deregulation by the free market's poster boy Greenspan, everyone from the packagers to the rating agencies used their newfound "innovations" to generate positive signs of growth when in fact there were none. It's easy to look back on it and say that companies should research everything, but that's a greater stifle of innovation than even regulation (if you can fucking believe that ). There were people that predicted disaster, but such situations would never have occured if these institutions were regulated (and they were, until again, Greenspan). The solution now is to bail these companies out (and prevent a depression, which is worth several billions more than what taxpayers will pay for these companies) and force them to accept stringent regulations from non-partisan committees that won't come into Wall Street shouting that regulation needs less and less money until finally it's ineffective at stopping any market abuses (which are real, frequent, and very big fucking deals). Fuck.

Why don't you go research this shit instead of thinking that God/thefreemarket will solve everything.

Here is a good start.

Well it looks like BOA bought Merrill Lynch. Does that take them out of the game for a player in the future of Lehman Bros?


Lets do a roll call. Which American financial institutions are doing well?