Feliz Aniversario!

En un artículo en el WSJ Cochrane y Zingales dicen que la caída de Lehman no fue la cause de la crisis:

On Sept. 22, bank credit-default swap (CDS) spreads were at the same level as on Sept. 12. (CDS spreads are the cost of buying insurance against default.) On Sept. 19, the S&P 500 closed above its Sept. 12 level. The Libor-OIS spread—which captures the perceived riskiness of short-term interbank lending—rose only 18 points the day of Lehman's collapse, while it shot up more than 60 points from Sept. 23 to Sept. 25, after the TARP testimony. (Libor—the London Interbank Offer Rate—is the rate at which banks can borrow unsecured for three months.)

Would a Lehman bailout have averted a panic? The news would still be that Lehman failed, and markets knew bailouts would not last forever. After all, the Bear Stearns rescue in February had just postponed worse trouble.

More deeply, Lehman's lesson cannot be that the government must always bail out every large financial institution. From the 1984 failure of Continental Illinois bank to the S&L crisis of the late 1980s, the Latin American bond defaults of the 1990s, the 1997 Asian crashes, the 1998 collapse of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund and now this mess, financial institutions are taking more and more risks, but their bondholders keep getting rescued.