Wednesday, September 18, 2019

The Lehman Brothers Valukas Report

This is the report into the collapse of Lehman Brothers by examiner Anton Valukas.  While this is ancient history from 2008, I still find it interesting.  The report is available here:
https://web.stanford.edu/~jbulow/Lehmandocs/VOLUME%201.pdf

The basic problem with Lehman is that it had a large amount of assets that had declined in value, like risky mortgages ("Alt-A").  Also, it was relying on the nightly repo market for funding to the tune of $200 billion.  Once it lost the confidence of its trading counterparties, its demise was inevitable.  The model that it used is no longer used by banks today.

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