Global Bank Holiday
A few weeks ago there was a New Yorker article that chronicled the eight days leading up to and after the collapse of Lehman Brothers (as usual they’ve decided to only offer the abstract to non-subscribers unfortunately). Since I mentioned my penchant for process stories, it should come as no surprise that I quite enjoyed this one. The highlight, though, might have been this quote from a treasury official that basically boils the whole thing down to just a few sentences:
The treasury official described the situation: “Lehman Brothers begat the Reserve collapse, which begat the money-market run, so the money-market funds wouldn’t buy commercial paper. The commercial-paper market was on the brink of destruction. At this point, the banking system stops functioning. You’re pulling four trilliout of of the private sector” — money-market funds — “and giving it to the government in the form of T-bills. That was commercial paper funding GE, Citigroup, FedEx, all the commercial-paper issuers. This was systemic risk. Suddenly, you have a global bank holiday.”
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Aside from the likelihood that there was a lot of reputation repairing in the interviews he received I expect ~80% of the details were true.
What was so enlightening to me is that with all their resources (which is to say about half the resources of the Western world) they only had the ability to put a tourniquet on the upper thigh of the economy and let the whole leg die to save the rest of the body. They had no ability to do any better then that even though the post-tourniquet consequences could have been mapped out by most any econ professor.