A year after the failure of Lehman Brothers, global regulators are still dealing with the aftermath and struggling to learn the lessons of the great panic of 2008.
Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at The Financial Times, says letting Lehman fail was the right course, if only because it forced regulators to “grapple with the crisis properly.” The steps taken in Lehman’s wake ultimately stabilized the global economy and reinvigorated the financial markets — at least for the time being, Wolf says, as we discuss in more detail in a separate segment.
But Wolf fears regulators learned the wrong lessons of Lehman’s bankruptcy, i.e. that they can’t ever allow a large financial institution to fail.
