Matt Levine, Columnist

Lehman Day and Identity Theft

Also hiding performance reviews, vibe-based forecasting, fairness opinions, EBay arbitrage, etc.

September 15, 2016 at 1:04 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Happy Lehman Day!

When do you think we'll stop commemorating the anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy? It is really amazing the extent to which the financial industry is still stuck in the shadow of 2008. Or maybe it isn't; maybe we have moved on too quickly and failed to learn the lessons of 2008, and the only cure is to wallow in Lehman's failure on each anniversary for the rest of time. My own memories of Lehman Day are embarrassingly fond: I was working as an investment banker and had just left for a week's vacation when Lehman filed, and when I got back I had more or less another six months off because markets were utterly dead. Still it was surreal to walk around that day, far from New York, and see people acting like everything was normal.