Most Americans probably won’t remember where they were on Lehman Monday, the morning of Sept. 15, 2008, when news that the investment bank was no more hit the pavement in Manhattan.
They aren’t thinking about it this weekend, the fourth anniversary, but they should be.
Four years later, the true financial fallout from the collapse is still being assessed, but a recent study tries to put a dollar amount on the damage — and it’s staggering.
According to the study, the 2008 financial crisis cost the US economy $12.8 trillion in lost output.
That would add up to about a year of lost gross domestic product (in 2008 terms). And while the folks behind the study, Better Markets, are a K Street outfit pushing for more financial reform, the figure seems pretty much on the conservative side of the equation.
Indeed, as the study’s author, Dennis Kelleher, rightly points out, the costs can’t be quantified. “There are perhaps tens of millions of Americans who will never regain their earnings, educations, skills and training that they lost,” he notes.
Indeed, since Lehman Monday officially inaugurated the Great Recession, average household wages in America have retreated to 1995 levels. This is significant, especially for those just entering the work force.
Studies show that the wages young workers earn at the beginning of their careers have a lasting impact on their incomes over a lifetime. “It’s like Japan,” global investor and informed bear Jim Rogers told Yahoo last week, “They’ve had two lost decades; we’re going to have one, two, maybe three.” Let’s hope he’s wrong.
What perhaps is even more stunning is what hasn’t happened since Dick Fuld & Co. left Seventh Avenue behind in the dust four Septembers ago.
Virtually everything that was predicted on that sunny Monday failed to happen.
While the rest of the nation saw housing values plummet, New York real estate has held up remarkably well. It’s been rock-solid, in fact.
The leaders of the major banks at the time of the crisis — Vikram Pandit of Citigroup, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase — still have their jobs.
The high-end art market is on fire, and a kindergarten slot at the city’s private schools is even harder to score than it was back in 2008.
What’s more, the twin items that led up to the crisis — unfettered derivatives trading and sky-high Wall Street bonuses — have been barely addressed.
So perhaps it is only fitting that just two days before the anniversary of the Lehman collapse, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke unleashed the biggest money-printing enterprise in history — an open-ended pledge to keep on buying up debt obligations as far as the eye can see.
His hope is to bring the unemployment rate down to 7.6 percent — a modest goal, given that it was just 6.1 percent on Lehman Monday.
Will it work?
Recent history suggests it will not. As Swiss investor Marc Faber told Bloomberg on Friday, that it’s a fallacy that all this money will go to Main Street. He’s calling for Bernanke to step down.
That’s unlikely unless President Obama fails to get re-elected. But it’s worth noting that even at a cost of almost $13 trillion dollars, the pain of the Lehman collapse and the Great Recession has been unevenly distributed at best — one reason it feels a lot worse to most Americans than it looks on paper.
new study from Better Markets A new study from Better Markets estimates the economic loss from the Great Recession at $12.8 trillion.
26.9M Unemployment high in Oct. 2009
23.1M Current unemployed
$19T Amount of household wealth that vanished, wiping out 20 years’ growth
46.2M Number of Americans at or belowpoverty line
9.3M Americans who have lost health coverage
$7T Lost property value
4.5M US foreclosures