Lehman Brothers bankruptcy
The failure of the US investment bank in September 2008 — the largest bankruptcy in American history.
How to read the number
Until then participants assumed a large bank would not be allowed to fall. Once it did, everyone began reassessing counterparties, and the market for short-term interbank lending shut.
When the metric lies
Opposite conclusions are drawn from it — that the bank should have been saved, and that it should not. The counterfactual cannot be tested; there was only one experiment.
Also known as: lehman collapse