A bank most people had never had a reason to think about, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy with roughly $600 billion in assets, and within days it was clear this wasn't a Wall Street story — it was everyone's. Retirement accounts fell, houses got repossessed, people who had done everything right lost jobs that had nothing to do with any of it. The phrase "too big to fail" entered everyday conversation as governments scrambled to bail out other banks before they went the same way. For a lot of people, this is the day the idea that the economy was basically stable quietly stopped being something they believed.
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