Some perspective on the Lehman implosion

TheDeal.com offers an interesting take on the Lehman Brothers failure. Lehman's liabilities totaled $613 billion at the time of its bankruptcy filing. Unsecured claims of the top 30 claimants show credit of approximately $150 billion. Here are some benchmarks: WorldCom, the previous corporate bankruptcy record-holder, had $34.3 billion in liabilities. Russia defaulted on debt of about $100 billion years ago. And get this: the Resolution Trust Corp. in the '90s shut down more than 700 institutions. Their total assets were just over half the amount of Lehman's total $639 billion. Lehman Brothers, of course, was fairly small compared to the other once-independent investment banks. So the issues as you can imagine are fairly complex. And remember this was a bank the regulators decided to let die.  

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