capital than Lehman had in 2007, when the banking industry was about as strong as it had ever been. Seventy-two hours later Lehman was bankrupt. The only thing that changed during those three days was investors’ faith in the company. One day they believed in the company and bought its debt. The next day that belief stopped, and so did its funding. That faith is the only thing that mattered. But it was the one thing that was hard to quantify, hard to model, hard to predict, and didn’t compute in a traditional valuation model. GameStop was the opposite. It looked like it was on the edge of going
...more