The chief executive officer at the source’s firm, a major Wall Street bank, had been summoned to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. On Saturday, as teams from across Wall Street gathered to find a solution — funding or otherwise — for Lehman, The Times’s Business desk tried to determine what was happening at the Fed. The same weekend, Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch for $50 billion, and the insurance giant AIG nearly cratered. Lehman’s failure “opened the portals of hell,” according to Diana B. Henriques, then a senior financial writer for The Times. “I was afraid A.T.M.s would go dark, so I told my husband to take as much cash out now as he could.”

Source: New York Times September 15, 2018 16:48 UTC