Irish Examiner view: 2008 bank collapse that changed our world

The fall of Lehman Brothers was a depth charge that brought a worldwide recession with maladies that persist today

Then US president George W Bush pauses during an economic statement at the White House in 2008 as the economic crash unfolded. Picture: Evan Vucci/AP

It was 15 years ago on Friday that we learned that the decades-old accountancy aphorism ‘too big to fail’ (tbtf) does not always hold true. Not by a long way. And that chaos theory is validated most quickly in the world’s connected financial markets.

It was the week US president George W Bush took advice from the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve, and signalled there would be no government bailout for one of the world’s largest investment banks.