Daily Archives: September 20, 2013

The “Lessons” that Wall Street, Treasury, and the White House Need You to Believe Five Years After the Collapse of Lehman Brothers

By Robert E. Prasch
Department of Economics
Middlebury College

Five long years have passed since the demise of the once venerable firm of Lehman Brothers. To mark the occasion, Wall Street, the United States Treasury Department, the White House, and their several political proxies and spokespersons have taken to the mass media to instruct the public in the “lessons” to be drawn from the financial crisis of 2007-09. Regrettably, we are witnessing the propagation of several self-serving falsehoods in the hope that the public can be induced to embrace them now that the immediacy of the events in question is in the past. Some of the lessons are so flagrantly false that they demand immediate correction.

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