Infiltrated: How to Stop the Insiders and Activists Who Are Exploiting the Financial Crisis to Control Our Lives and Our Fortunes

CHAPTER 7

MELTDOWN

On Friday, September 12, 2008, Timothy Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve, called the CEOs of the major Wall Street banks in to the Federal Reserve for a last-minute meeting. Joining Geithner was Treasury Secretary Henry “Hank” Paulson and Christopher Cox of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).¹ The meeting’s purpose was to persuade the executives in attendance to work together to save one of their ailing competitors, Lehman Brothers. Lehman, a Wall Street fixture since 1848 and the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States, was on the verge of collapse. Paulson and Geithner told the CEOs that if the investment bank failed without remedy, the ensuing financial death spiral would suck in not ...