On June 13, 2008, Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn emailed Chairman Ben Bernanke about his grave concerns over Lehman Brothers. This wasn’t September, when all the fireworks exploded, it was months beforehand when everything was supposedly fixed and moving in the right direction. That’s what they all said.
In public.
The night before this email, Kohn and System General Counsel Scott Alvarez had been on the phone with staff members at the central bank’s New York branch (FRBNY), members of the SEC, as well as some officials from the Treasury Department. Lehman Brothers had decided it was going to raise $6 billion in equity capital which many – and many government people – believed was going to quiet the situation.
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