It’s worth briefly recapping where the US economy was at this point. Virtually every economic indicator looked to be falling extremely quickly. As an illustration, in a single day in January, reports of employment cuts across companies totaled 62,000. In addition to weak economic growth, there were still at least five major financial institutions at risk of failure: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Citigroup, and Bank of America; each of these was bigger than Lehman.
