Chapters 14-15 Summary and Analysis

Chapter 14 opens with a description of the moments when several of the most powerful leaders of Wall Street received a last-minute call directing them to meet at the New York Federal Reserve to discuss a plan to save Lehman brothers. At the meeting, Tim Geithner explained the spin-off bank proposal with which Lehman had come up. He told the executives that there were two possible bidders for the "good" bank and that the job of the people assembled there was to find a way to finance the "bad" bank over the weekend. He broke the group into three parts, each one working on a separate issue. He emphasized that there would be no government money involved in the solution. Dick Fuld was not invited to the meeting, and was nervously trying to get in touch with Ken Lewis at...