Which U.S. investment bank filed for bankruptcy at the center of the 2008 financial crisis?

Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy at the center of the 2008 financial crisis.

The investment bank submitted its Chapter 11 filing on September 15, 2008. It was the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history at the time, with hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. The failure intensified an already serious crisis in credit and housing markets.

Lehman had built a major business around mortgage-related securities and other financial products. When U.S. house prices fell and mortgage defaults increased, the value of many of those holdings became uncertain. Investors and counterparties lost confidence, making it difficult for the firm to raise funding or sell assets quickly.

The collapse was not the only important event of the crisis. Bear Stearns had been rescued earlier in 2008, while Merrill Lynch agreed to be acquired by Bank of America during the same weekend as Lehman’s bankruptcy. The Lehman failure is nevertheless widely used as a defining marker of the crisis because it triggered severe disruption in global financial markets.