The banks, the frauds, the dynasties — the ten biggest collapses in history, and exactly how each one fell apart.
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The largest bankruptcy in world history. A 158-year-old Wall Street institution collapsed in a single weekend, wiping out $46 billion in shareholder value and helping trigger a global financial crisis that cost the world an estimated $2 trillion.
Eleven days after Lehman fell, regulators seized WaMu in the middle of the night and sold it to JPMorgan Chase for pocket change — the biggest bank failure the United States has ever seen.
Cornelius Vanderbilt built a shipping and railroad fortune worth more than the U.S. Treasury. Within decades, his descendants spent it on mansions, yachts, and parties so extravagant that by 1973, a family reunion of 120 Vanderbilts couldn't find a single millionaire among them.
Executives disguised billions in ordinary expenses as long-term investments to fake profits and prop up the stock. When internal auditors found it, the telecom giant's collapse became the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history at the time — and its CEO went to prison for 25 years.
For decades it was the largest company in the world and a symbol of American industrial might. Crushed by falling sales, a financial crisis, and its own legacy pension costs, GM needed a $50 billion taxpayer bailout just to survive bankruptcy.
For decades, a former Nasdaq chairman ran the largest Ponzi scheme ever uncovered, paying old investors with new investors' money while claiming steady returns that were entirely fabricated. When the 2008 crash caused a wave of withdrawals, there was nothing left to pay.
Six years running, Fortune named Enron America's most innovative company. It was hiding billions in debt in shell companies the whole time. When the truth came out, the stock collapsed from $90 to 61 cents, and thousands of employees watched their retirement savings vanish overnight.
He was called crypto's answer to Warren Buffett, worth an estimated $26 billion at his peak. Then a leaked balance sheet revealed billions in customer funds had secretly been funneled to a sister trading firm — and the entire empire evaporated in barely a week.
She dropped out of Stanford at 19 promising to revolutionize medicine with a single drop of blood. Investors handed her nearly a billion dollars and a $9 billion valuation. The technology, it turned out, barely worked at all.
Barings had financed the Napoleonic Wars and the Louisiana Purchase. It survived 233 years — until a single rogue trader in Singapore made unauthorized bets that lost more money than the entire bank was worth, and it collapsed within days.
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