Lehman Brothers’ collapse became the central event of the 2008 global financial crisis.
Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, after suffering enormous losses connected to mortgages and other real-estate-related securities. With about $639 billion in assets, it was the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history at the time.
The failure intensified an already serious crisis in credit markets. Banks became less willing to lend to one another, investors sold risky assets, and stock markets around the world plunged. The collapse followed the earlier rescue of Bear Stearns and occurred shortly before the U.S. government’s rescue of insurer AIG.
Lehman is sometimes described as a stock-market crash itself, but it was more precisely a corporate failure that helped trigger a dramatic phase of the broader global financial crisis.