CNNFN: Events That Broke Wall Street

The events that broke Wall Street: A shocking series of events that forever changed the financial markets
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/news/0809/gallery.week_that_broke_wall_street/

A year ago, the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off a series of stunning events from which Wall Street is still recovering.

Seemingly every day for about month, a different legendary financial company teetered on collapse.  Stocks recorded some of their most dramatic drops in history, including the Dow's epic 778-point drop on Sept. 29 -- the biggest ever single-day slide.  And lawmakers worked overtime in an effort to stem off a failure of the financial system.

The solution: a series of unprecedented and expensive bailouts to save systemically significant institutions from failing and to loosen the tight grip on credit.



Today is the one-year anniversary of the biggest event to shake Wall Street to its core in the most recent market downturn: the bankruptcy of the Lehman Brothers. The DOW tumbled as far down as 6500 in March 2009 before it has made a steady recovery (although most analysts feel as though the "recovery" has been backtracking lost ground because the investors in large over-reacted to the news). Regardless, this 33-date timeline from the above link is interesting from a historical perspective (granted, it's no fall of ENRON but somewhat interesting nonetheless).