Lehman ten years on: more has changed than meets the eye

MASOOD, who uses no other name, is the proprietor of the Express Café coffee cart that sits outside 745 Seventh Avenue in midtown Manhattan. He thus had a front-row seat for the global financial crisis. In 1998 he was selling his wares to the workers at the building site where a new 32-floor building for Morgan Stanley was going up. In 2001 he greeted the employees of Lehman Brothers, whose downtown headquarters had been damaged and polluted by the attacks of September 11th; having been working shifts in a nearby hotel, they were delighted to move into the building Morgan Stanley had ceded to them. He was there on September 15th 2008 when Lehman’s employees filed out with soon-to-be-iconic cardboard boxes. And he was there in the days that followed, when many of them came back, some with the same boxes, to work on cleaning up the mess under the auspices of Barclays.

The fall of Lehman was not the beginning of the global financial crisis, nor the moment when risks were highest: that came in the days and weeks that followed, as more and more institutions started to teeter. But it was the point at which the previously unthinkable became real. A big bank with a portfolio of dodgy securities that dwarfed its capital could no longer fund itself—and it was allowed to fail. The world’s credit markets froze with fear. A complete collapse of the financial system seemed plausible, and with it a global depression much deeper than the parlous recession which actually followed.