I often say to entrepreneurs, 'If Lehman Brothers were Lehman Brothers & Sisters, it wouldn't have gone into bankruptcy.'
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When I left my job at Lehman Brothers to start a company, my best friend's mother said, 'How could you leave a sure thing like Lehman to do a silly carpool startup?' That was three months before Lehman went bankrupt.
A Fed loan to Lehman Brothers would not have prevented a bankruptcy.
In the business world, we can point to instances when a lack of integrity has bankrupted entire companies - in sectors as different as finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, and energy.
The assumption that Washington could and would resolve Lehman Brothers without a bankruptcy, as it had Bear Stearns, was the single biggest mistake in the series of mistakes in 2007 and 2008 that led to the financial panic and the ensuing epidemic of job losses.
The failure of Lehman may have allowed the government to do more to prop up the economy than it otherwise could.
There's something called, 'resolution authority,' which gives the government the power to takeover a failing bank - something they didn't have pre-Lehman Brothers.
There are lots of businesses that are well in excess of $9 billion that have gone into bankruptcy, that have been mismanaged. And that has not served anyone very well.
At IBM, if we kept our same leadership for 36 years, we'd be bankrupt.
We cannot allow the bankruptcy of a euro member state like Greece to turn into a second Lehman Brothers.
In truth, in the fairy-tale version of bailing out Lehman, the next domino, A.I.G., would have fallen even harder. If the politics of bailing out Lehman were bad, the politics of bailing out A.I.G. would have been worse. And the systemic risk that a failure of A.I.G. posed was orders of magnitude greater than Lehman's collapse.
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