On March 13, J.P. Morgan reported that rather than a normal market depth of hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. Treasuries, it was possible to trade no more than $12 million without noticeably moving the price.6 That was less than one-tenth of normal market liquidity. This was a state of financial panic, which if it had been allowed to develop, would have been more destabilizing even than the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008.
