Lehman Brothers

Cause of death

Killed by cost

with killed by disaster as a contributing factor

Lehman filed for Chapter 11 in the early hours of September 15, 2008, after a weekend of rescue talks produced neither a buyer nor a federal backstop.

Three German immigrant brothers running a store in Montgomery, Alabama founded the firm in 1850, and it survived the Civil War, the Depression and every panic in between. What it did not survive was a balance sheet leveraged into subprime mortgages. When the weekend of emergency talks ended with no buyer and no government rescue, it filed before dawn on Monday declaring $639 billion in assets against $613 billion in debts, still the largest bankruptcy in US history.