Lehman Brothers survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, and two World Wars, growing into the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States by 2008. It had bet heavily on the booming U.S. housing market, packaging risky subprime mortgages into securities sold to investors worldwide.
When the housing bubble burst in 2007–2008, Lehman was left holding tens of billions of dollars in toxic mortgage assets nobody wanted. Unlike Bear Stearns months earlier, the U.S. government refused to arrange a bailout. On September 15, 2008, Lehman filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with $639 billion in assets — still the largest bankruptcy filing in history.
The collapse triggered a global panic, freezing credit markets worldwide and helping plunge the world into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. An estimated 8 million Americans lost their jobs in the recession that followed. Lehman's remaining operations were sold off piecemeal to Barclays and Nomura within days.
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