I think, with Hank Paulson, the concept of a bailout was anathema to him from day one. He was a Republican; he's a free marketeer. He believes in capitalism, and part of capitalism is believing in failure. And so the idea of bailing out an institution, I think, went against every part of him.
In truth, in the fairy-tale version of bailing out Lehman, the next domino, A.I.G., would have fallen even harder. If the politics of bailing out Lehman were bad, the politics of bailing out A.I.G. would have been worse. And the systemic risk that a failure of A.I.G. posed was orders of magnitude greater than Lehman's collapse.
The blowback against a bailout of Lehman would have been fierce. It is often forgotten, but the prevailing wisdom the day after Lehman fell was that its collapse was a good thing.
In September 2008 - as Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and AIG, the world's biggest insurance company, accepted a federal bailout - Senator John McCain of Arizona, in what was widely viewed as a political move, suspended his presidential campaign and called on Obama to rush back to Washington for a bipartisan meeting at the White House.
Perhaps the biggest economic shift during Obama's presidency came from a piece of legislation that wasn't sold as such. On March 21, 2010, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. It was Obama's boldest piece of legislation and the one that will most likely define him.
Hard paywalls will never work because, just like at a newsstand, the reader likes to browse the cover and a few articles before choosing to buy. Even if the material is truly unique, a consumer likes to try a little before buying.
Debt, we've learned, is the match that lights the fire of every crisis. Every crisis has its own set of villains - pick your favorite: bankers, regulators, central bankers, politicians, overzealous consumers, credit rating agencies - but all require one similar ingredient to create a true crisis: too much leverage.
What if the slowdown in merger activity isn't cyclical, but secular? What if corporations have learned the lessons of so many companies before them that the odds of a successful merger are no better than 50-50 and probably less? Is it possible that the biggest deals have already been done?
Here's the perversity of Wall Street's psychology: The more Wall Street is convinced that Washington will act rationally and raise the debt ceiling, most likely at the 11th hour, the less pressure there will be on lawmakers to reach an agreement. That will make it more likely a deal isn't reached.
Wall Street's biggest fight with Obama was over the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Obama signed into law in the summer of 2010.
The greatest economic power might in fact remain in the hands of the Federal Reserve. Economists credit the Fed's policy of keeping interest rates at historic lows with helping to pump up the economy and bring unemployment down.
In many ways, education is a lousy business. Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry, given their skills and advanced degrees.
Why do we have financial crises? Why do banks lose money? If history is any guide, it hasn't often been the result of speculative bets. It has been the result of banks making loans to individuals and businesses who can't pay them back.
The moment a large investor doesn't believe a government will pay back its debt when it says it will, a crisis of confidence could develop. Investors have scant patience for the years of good governance - politically fraught fiscal restructuring, austerity and debt rescheduling - it takes to defuse a sovereign-debt crisis.
By now, it seems as if everyone has already read Thomas L. Friedman's 'The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.' It changed the way we think about global business, competitiveness and the implication for far-flung economies, governments, education and more.
The genre of narrative business books that I love so much - the ones that have a you-are-there quality - was invented, or so it is said, in 1982 by David McClintick, who wrote 'Indecent Exposure,' a rollicking good read about a Hollywood scandal and the ultimate boardroom power struggle at Columbia Pictures.
Wall Street is littered with clever plans to use financial instruments to change behavior - carbon trading, for example. Some have changed the world, and others failed miserably.
In truth, Wall Street is in for a radical makeover. Fewer people, lower margins, lower risk, lower compensation - and ultimately, fewer talented people. It is likely to change the culture of an industry that for nearly a century has been the money center of the world.
The economic meltdown that would define every aspect of Obama's economy came to a head well before he became president, of course, and so did the legislation that would be the basis for everything that came after.
Unemployment in Florida peaked at 11.2 percent in 2009, higher than the national average, and the state was a center for home foreclosures.
