I feel that no single date/day or a person or a thought changes one’s life forever. Or those would be very very few. However, there are dates/days/persons/events that shape up one’s life significantly, change the course or cause long-term impact.
15th September is one such date in my life. 15th September 2008 to be precise. It was the day when Lehman Brothers’ collapsed. It was the most devastating event of the 2008 Financial Crisis which affected the world and for a long time. I was also personally impacted due to it. Today marks 15 years of that event and hence I thought of remembering my own experience.
I was in the UK at that time, completing my MBA. 15th September 2008 was the due date for my MBA dissertation submission. I had booked my return flight to India a week later. The formal graduation would take place in December 2008.
During the first half of 2008, the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US was spreading across the world – thanks to the exotic Derivatives (Warren Buffett called them the Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction) – and slowly becoming the global financial crisis. What started as sub-prime mortgage issue was blown into full-scale systemic crisis where many banks and insurance companies were staring at collapse. “Too Big To Fail” became a popular phrase.
Today marks 15 years of Lehman Brothers’ collapse (15th September 2008)! I have personal memories of that day, reading the story in the Financial Times in the UK over next 3-4 days. I didn’t realise how big an impact that event was going to cause on me personally. Learnt a lot from that incident and the learning still continues.
The Financial Times was full of images of Lehman Brothers employees leaving the office with their boxes and files. There were many cartoons on the market crash – the one I remember vividly said: “This (stock market crash of 2008) is worse than a divorce. I have lost 50% of my portfolio and still have my wife“. Economists who failed to predict and flag the building of a bubble and subsequent crisis were also made fun of.
A popular joke was:
Q: What is the difference between a micro-economist and a macro-economist?
A: “Micro-economists are wrong about specific things and macro-economists are wrong in general.”
There were many documentaries created to explain what really happened. Do check the BBC documentary “The Last Days of Lehman Brothers” or “Global Financial Meltdown” which is available on Youtube to know more about 2008 crisis.
There were many comic spoofs explaining the 2008 crisis (the Great Recession); the one I liked the most was the Bird and Fortune act explaining “Subprime Crisis”.
Do check it here:
This is more of a leisurely post about the Lehman Brothers’ collapse. I’ll write a separate post to explain in layman’s terms what subprime crisis was.
ekoshapu 
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