Danny Schechter - ColdType

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Housing Bubble blog, http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com:
This astonishing news comes during a weekend when most
of the market on Friday was expecting that someone would
surely come to the table to help the firm. Whether it was a
private purchase or a government sponsored bailout like
what occurred with Bear Stearns and J.P. Morgan, bankruptcy
was not expected by many. Early talks indicated that Bank
of America and Barclays were in close talks to take over the
troubled investment bank. The Federal Reserve which aided
in helping the Bear Stearns deal and the U.S. Treasury which
just last weekend entered into the biggest bailout known
to humankind by aiding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both
seemed unwilling to come to the aid of Lehman Brothers. I
am sure as time goes on more and more details will emerge
as to why this occurred … It is unprecedented that in only six
months, 3 of the top 5 investment houses on Wall Street are
no longer in their previous form.
Few in the media could agree on what led to Lehman’s
liquidation. Writing in Newsweek, Liaquat Ahamed ended up
blaming politicians:
It has become conventional wisdom: the signal event of the
current crisis, the transformative moment when things truly
really began to spin out of control, was the government’s decision
to let Lehman Brothers fail. But when one looks closely
at what happened in the weeks after the bank’s fall – by any
measure the most turbulent and dramatic period in the last
75 years of financial history – Lehman’s collapse was not in
fact to blame for pushing global markets and the economy
over the edge. Sure, it was a shock. But the Fed’s response
was sufficiently imaginative, far-reaching and aggressive
to mitigate most of the knock-on effects. Instead it was the
political battle in Congress, which ensued over the bank bailout
package, that really caused the meltdown.
Yet at the same time, and this reality was not the focus of
most of the media attention. According to the Housing blog,