This week marks the eighteenth anniversary of the failure of Lehman Brothers, a key event of the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC). Lehman’s failure and the GFC more broadly were dramatic economic events. Lehman Brothers was the largest bankruptcy in US history to date. The global financial crisis gave rise to the Great Recession. The stock market fell by more than 50 percent, the economy contracted by 4.3 percent, unemployment rose from 4.7 percent to 10 percent, and the subsequent decade of US economic growth was abnormally anemic.
Many myths about Lehman’s failure and about the 2008 global financial crisis continue to dominate public discourse. Popular consensus still places the blame primarily on deregulation, Wall Street greed, and reckless financial engineering. And many anecdotes inform their perspective.
Mortgage fraud was common and egregious, especially in the final few years of the housing frenzy (2004–2007). No-doc loans, NINJA loans, and liar loans were far too common—and most people were not held accountable for their complicity. Accusations of fraud by large banks and credit rating agencies, though, were largely overstated. Other than a couple big mortgage lenders engaged in systemic fraud (Countrywide) or truly reckless lending (Golden West), most financial institutions operated on the right side of the law.
The real driver of the GFC was pervasive bad incentives created by years of misregulation. Consider, for example, the Federal Reserve’s Recourse Rule. This regulated how much capital banks had to hold against different classes of assets, and strongly favored mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Not surprisingly, banks shifted their portfolios to hold more MBS — one of the major asset classes to blow up in 2008. Regulation created this herd-like behavior, leading to overconcentration in a certain asset and greater systemic fragility.
Simultaneously, more than a decade of regulatory pressure forced Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lower their underwriting standards — a shift that soon infected the entire industry. The Community Reinvestment Act, federal agencies, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development all pushed for reduced mortgage underwriting standards. More people were able to buy a home — even if they couldn’t afford it.
Peter Wallison and Edward Pinto document this regulatory transformation. Far from a market-driven “race to the bottom” by private lenders chasing short-term profit, housing regulators in the early 1990s viewed traditional underwriting standards as discriminatory barriers to homeownership. Using the 1992 Housing and Community Development Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development mandated affordable-housing quotas for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — requiring them to allocate an ever-increasing share of their support to low- and moderate-income borrowers, starting at 30 percent in 1992 and climbing to 56 percent by 2008.
To achieve these goals, Fannie and Freddie systematically dismantled traditional underwriting guidelines. The conventional mortgage market consisted of 30-year fixed-rate loans requiring 20 percent down payments, fully documented borrower income, and high credit scores. These mortgages were remarkably stable and had very low levels of defaults.
But by the mid-2000s, this underwriting standard had been replaced by loans with less than 10 percent down payments, adjustable interest rates, and lower FICO requirements. As Pinto later argued in a report to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, roughly 27 million US mortgages — half of the entire market in 2008 — were high-risk, non-traditional loans, with government-backed agencies holding or guaranteeing the vast majority of them.
The otherwise laudable goal of increasing access and affordability led to higher housing prices and degraded the quality of mortgage finance, which then made its way onto bank balance sheets. Misregulation didn’t stop once the crisis began — the same instinct to override market signals with discretionary judgment, which had already reshaped underwriting standards for a decade, next reshaped the government’s response to the panic itself.
Government interventions meant to “fix” the market made things worse. Lehman’s failure was certainly a blow to the market, but not as much as some people make it out to be. The S&P finished fractionally higher the Friday after Lehman’s failure than it had the Friday before — most of the stock market decline came weeks later in October following further government interventions.
Two previous government actions that made Lehman’s bankruptcy more disruptive than it needed to be. In March 2008, government officials brokered a bailout for Bear Stearns. This created a moral hazard in which Lehman executives rejected acquisition bids from interested investors and delayed deleveraging their mortgage portfolios, likely in the expectation that they would receive a deal, too. Federal officials’ last-minute attempt to rescue Lehman left the firm unprepared for its complex Chapter 11, resulting in a chaotic bankruptcy that destroyed wealth and froze counterparties worldwide.
Lehman’s failure highlights the broader problem in 2008: discretionary and reactionary government actions meant to dampen the GFC unintentionally made it worse. They created uncertainty and panic. Consider how the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) required all major banks to take bailout money even if they didn’t need it. Treasury Secretary Paulson didn’t want investors and lenders to identify and dump the weakest banks.
Yet this badly misjudged the market. Most lenders and investors had a pretty good sense of which banks were in trouble already. Forcing healthy institutions to take TARP funds signaled that contagion was deeper and more systemic than feared, accelerating capital flight from the banking sector.
Government officials also created perverse incentives by bailing out some firms early while letting others fail. If there is one thing worse for markets than bad news, it is uncertainty. And the Bush administration created deep market paralysis with its inconsistent, and often panicked, interventions in financial markets in 2008. Ordinary Americans paid the price then and are still paying the price today, in the form of greater government distortions of financial markets.
The Federal Reserve still holds nearly $2 trillion of MBS, an asset class it bought, and continued to buy, due to the “emergency” 18 years ago. More problematic, though, is that the GFC shook people’s confidence in markets and in a free economy. The drive for broader government assistance programs on both sides of the political aisle has been fomented in part by the calamity of the GFC. Subsequent asset bubbles fueled popular cynicism about cronyism in the financial system.
The institutional memory from 2008 was on display in 2020 and 2021, when both the Federal Reserve and two different administrations turned on spigots of government spending, lending, and economic stimulus — resulting in the elevated inflation we face today. Nearly a quarter of the dollar’s value has vanished since 2019.
If there is one thing we should learn from the 2008 GFC, it is that discretionary government interventions tend to generate negative unintended consequences. Even more importantly, we should view calls for more regulation, whether of cryptocurrency, stablecoins, energy production, or data center construction, with a skeptical eye.
Individual rules that may seem to make sense on paper can create perverse incentives, especially when they come stacked on top of other regulations. Unintended regulatory synergies generate herd-like behavior. Precisely the opposite is required for the decentralized experimentation that drives economic resilience.
