Lehman Brothers

Lehman filed for Chapter 11 at 1:45 am Eastern with $639 billion in assets. By the time Asian markets opened a few hours later, every major trading desk in the world had read the filing in full, knew the counterparty exposures, and had started repositioning. The synchronized global response is the part that was new: it was the first major bank failure of the genuine internet era, and the speed of information reset what a banking panic could look like.