When Buffett offers you a few billion dollars -- and you foolishly reject it -- you can no longer make the claim that attempts to raise capital were unsuccessful.

It is very easy to succumb to hindsight. Just peruse some of the news headlines of the day, and you get a very different sense than the one Ball has assembled.

No, Lehman Brothers did not “precipitate” the financial crisis. The better metaphor is that Lehman was the first trailer in the park to be destroyed by the tornado. Whether it lived or died was not going to stop the financial forces that had been decades in the making and unleashed when the credit bubble popped.

I agree with Ann Rutledge, a principal with New York-based R&R Consulting, and co-author of two books on structured finance. She noted “It wasn’t a mistake to let Lehman fail, it was a mistake to let it live so long.”

Maybe now this exercise can be put to rest once and for all.

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