On Monday September 14th, a stunning makeover of the Wall Street landscape sent stocks free-falling, with the Dow Jones industrials losing 500 points. It was their worst slide since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Investors recoiled after a shakeup of the financial industry that took out two storied names: Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Merrill Lynch & Co.
The pullback erased about $700 billion in shareholder wealth occurring across much of the globe as investors absorbed Lehman's bankruptcy filing and an essentially a forced sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America for 50 billion dollars in stock.
Joseph Stiglitzis Professor of Economics at Columbia University and the 2001 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics. He's also Former Chief Economist at the World Bank and author of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict...