“Crisis on Wall Street, Lehman in the balance, Merrill for sale and AIG looking for money”. So headlined the six-column Wall Street Journal on Monday, September 15, 2008. In the night between Sunday and Monday, the deed that started the Great Crisis officially took place, the signals of which already arrived in 2007 with the subprime mortgage crisis and which then exploded definitively with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers bank transforming the financial crisis into a systemic crisis, the biggest since that of 29, and then paving the way for the recession.
The bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers bank, one of the largest in the United States, was as sudden as it was devastating.
Exactly eleven years ago, the bank founded in 1850 by a family of cattle merchants who emigrated from Germany, announced its intention to make use of Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code, ie the procedure that is implemented in the event of bankruptcy. Lehman Brothers raised the curtain on the largest bankruptcy in US history (surpassed the previous WorldCom record in 2002, announcing bank debts of 613 billion dollars, bonds of 155 billion and assets worth 639 billion.
That day, before being suspended, Lehman Brothers shares plunged 80% in the pre-opening phase of the New York Stock Exchange, and the Dow Jones index he closed the session of that black Monday down by 500 points, realizing the biggest fall since the one that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001. The bank's 26.000 employees (of whom 6.000 in Europe and 140 in Italy between Rome and Milan) instantly lost their jobs, and the images of employees leaving the New York office with boxes are still etched in the collective memory .
Richard Fuld, chairman and director of Lehman, who had for some time presented false balance sheets and in the last ten years he had paid $300.000 to US congressmen and senators to bribe them, was immediately investigated by other congressmen himself, but not by the judiciary, and started his own new business. In general, many of the crack perpetrators were acquitted or not even tried, and some of them were able to subsequently obtain other important banking positions.
Only on March 6, 2012, a full 1.268 days after the crack, Lehman Brothers Holdings exited Chapter 11, or from $639 billion in receivership. The company began repaying creditors on April 17, thus closing the chapter that began on September 15, 2008, when Lehman collapsed, starting the global financial crisis. This phase saw the distribution to creditors of only approximately 65 billion dollars, against requests for over 300 billion.
The long wave of the Great Crisis, first financial and then economic, obviously also reached Europe. In Italy in 2009 the GDP lost more than 3% and only ten years later, with difficulty the Italian gross domestic product managed to return to pre-crisis levels. Several European banks went into severe difficulty and national or continental bailout plans were needed in some cases to avoid another shock on the markets. But Lehman's lesson has left its mark.
