It Is The Four-Year Anniversary of the Lehman Crisis*

*And this asshole is still not in jail.

I had forgotten. Asleep at the switch. It's the four-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.

• 9/15/2008: Bank of America announced its intent to purchase Merrill Lynch for $50 billion
• 9/15/2008: Lehman Brothers Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection
• 9/16/2008: The Federal Reserve Board authorized the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to lend up to $85 billion to AIG under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act
• 9/16/2008: The net asset value of shares in the Reserve Primary Money Fund fell below $1, primarily due to losses on Lehman Brothers commercial paper and medium-term notes
• 9/19/2008: The Treasury Department announced that it would insure up to $50 billion in money-market fund investments at companies that pay a fee to participate in the program. The year-long initiative guaranteed that the funds' value will not fall below the $1 a share
• 9/20/2008: The Treasury Department submitted draft legislation to Congress for authority to purchase troubled assets
• 9/21/2008: The Federal Reserve Board approved applications of investment banking companies Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to become bank holding companies

Tempus Fugit! — Time flies, especially when you're having fun!

Lehman Brokerage Payout Demands Amplify on Fourth Anniversary

Sept. 15, 2012 (Bloomberg) — Defunct brokerage Lehman Brothers Inc., which hasn’t paid institutional creditors a dime of its $25 billion hoard after four years in liquidation, is facing louder demands to settle fights with affiliates and pay up.

The brokerage’s parent, Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc. made its first payment of $22.5 billion to creditors last April, about 3 1/2 years after filing the biggest U.S. bankruptcy in history four years ago today on Sept. 15, 2008. The brokerage went into liquidation four days later.

And so on... Same shit, different day.

What is there to say today, four years after the financial crisis which brought down the phony American economy?

Here's a thought.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made
   — Immanuel Kant

Here's another.

Men would no longer be victims of nature or of their own largely irrational societies: reason would triumph; universal harmonious cooperation, true history, would at last begin.

For if this was not so, do the ideas of progress, of history, have any meaning? Is there not a movement, however tortuous, from ignorance to knowledge, from mythical thought and childish fantasies to perception of reality face to face, to knowledge of true goals, true values as well as truths of fact? Can history be a mere purposeless succession of events, caused by a mixture of material factors and the play of random selection, a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing?

This was unthinkable. The day would dawn when men and women would take their lives in their own hands and not be self-seeking beings or the playthings of blind forces that they did not understand. It was, at the very least, not impossible to conceive that such an earthly paradise could be; and if conceivable we could, at any rate, try to march towards it.

That has been at the centre of ethical thought from the Greeks to the Christian visionaries of the Middle Ages, from the Renaissance to progressive thought in the last century; and indeed, is believed by many to this day.
  — Isaiah Berlin

Happy anniversary!

Comments

[Ben]

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed a $2.2 billion suit against JPMorgan Chase & Co - Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. v. JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, 12-01874, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

The parasitical assholes are eating each other.

[Gail]

SCHAUMBURG, IL—In a turn of events that has stunned the worldwide medical community, local infant Nathan Jameson, born just six days ago, has become the youngest person ever to permanently and irrevocably lose all faith in humanity.

“This shatters all previous records,” University of Chicago psychologist Douglas McAllister said Monday. “In all of documented medical history, there is no case of a newborn taking less than four months to develop the mental faculties required to grasp the full extent of this existential nightmare we call life on earth.”

“Considering he already comprehends harsh realities that many people spend their entire fleeting, shallow existences attempting to deny, Baby Nathan is quite the little miracle!” he added.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/newborn-loses-faith-in-humanity-after-record-6-day,29588/?ref=auto