ABSTRACT
On 15 September 2008, the supposedly safe, perpetually prosperous post-industrial global economic system blew itself up when Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The 158-year-old iconic investment bank was forced into this extreme act when the collapse of the US sub-prime mortgage market turned the securitized mortgage-backed debt obligations into toxic assets. Initially, US$7.8 billion in mortgage-related bonds were considered worthless. The bank also admitted that it still had $54 billion of exposure to hard-to-value mortgage-backed securities (Gökay and Whitman 2009).
