The Myth We Still Tell About the Fall of Lehman Bros.

We are ten years out from the fall of Lehman Brothers, and the worst financial crises in the lifetime of most of us. But what are we actually marking, and more importantly, what have we really learned?

So much of the debate, to this very day, as to what caused the crash, and the bursting of the housing bubble is so caught up in political rhetoric, confirmation bias, and rear end covering, that it's still hard to tell.

But certainly after 10 years we know more than we did then, and perhaps it’s time to ask some real questions and to try and put it into some kind of better perspective. To do this, I’m helped by Sebastian Mallaby, the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and a long time journalist, public speaker, and a contributing columnist for the Washington Post. His recent article in the Washington Post was “The Dangerous Myth We Still Believe About the Lehman Bros. Bust.”

My conversation with Sebastian Mallaby:

Why Presidential Appointees Matter

Back in 1992 the mantra of the Bill Clinton campaign was that “it's the economy stupid.” Surprising, since the majority of American campaigns for President have always been about the economy.

However since the 1970’s that economy has been changing dramatically and rapidly. It was only as far back as the Nixon administration that we were still on the gold standard. Things like derivatives didn’t exist. Subprime lending, globalization of money and creative destruction in the economy had not yet set up a paradigm for collapse.

Presiding over so much of this change, watching all of it and dire
cting some of it, was Alan Greenspan.  Towering over the Federal Reserve for 18 years and serving five Presidents, no one knew more about the inner and outer working of the American economy than Greenspan.

Now we get the first full scale economic and person biography of Greenspan in Sebastian Mallaby's The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan.

My conversation with Sebastian Mallaby: