Winter storms of 2008–09

Consider the main wreckage of 2008: Bear Stearns, bought by J.P. Morgan Chase; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taken over by the U.S., the parent that didn’t want them; Merrill Lynch, bought by Bank of America; Lehman, gone bankrupt; AIG, rescued by the U.S.; Wachovia, bought by Wells Fargo. It was the earliest casualty of these, Bear, that brought a new concept—“too interconnected to fail”—to the forefront. Going in, the government really did not want to save the company. Robert Steel, a ranking member of Henry “Hank” Paulson’s U.S. Treasury team, remembers the case against a rescue: “Gee whiz, this isn’t a depository institution. It should just go out of business.” Nor was it that Bear was a colossus in derivatives: Its book at the end of the company’s 2007 fiscal year (its last) had a notional value of “only” $13.4 trillion, compared to $85 trillion for the giant among U.S. derivatives dealers, J.P. Morgan. Bill Winters, co-head of investment banking at J.P. Morgan, says that in Bear’s last week—as the firm teetered between bankruptcy and being bought by his company—he even worried less about derivatives than he did about the many billions that the firm borrowed every day on its assets in the overnight loan market ...»