Quick Thoughts on the Collapse of Lehman

Robert Samuelson takes on the collapse of Lehman a decade ago and assesses the argument of Larry Ball that the Fed could have bailed out Lehman. He ends up siding with Bernanke–Paulson and says the Fed would have taken big losses if it bailed out Lehman. He also says we would have seen the financial crisis anyhow.

There are three points worth making here. First, the claim that the Fed lacked the legal authority to bail out Lehman is absurd on its face. The Fed was doing lots of things at that...