It is now clear that we are again – as we were in mid- March at the time of the Bear Stearns collapse – an epsilon away from a generalized run on most of the shadow banking system, especially the other major independent broker dealers (Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs). If Lehman does not find a buyer over the weekend and the counterparties of Lehman withdraw their credit lines on Monday (as they all will in the absence of a deal) you will have not only a collapse of Lehman but also the beginning of a run on the other independent broker dealers (Merrill Lynch first but also in sequence Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and possibly even those broker dealers that are part of a larger commercial bank, I.e. JP Morgan and Citigroup). Then this run would lead to a massive systemic meltdown of the financial system. That is the reason why the Fed has convened in emergency meetings the heads of all major Wall Street firms on Friday and again today to convince them not to pull the plug on Lehman and maintain their exposure to this distressed broker dealer.

Let me elaborate in much detail on these issues…

This bail-in of investors is the opposite of a bailout of investors like the one that was done in the case of Bear Stearns and Fannie and Freddie. It is thus akin to the bail-in of investors that was done in the case of LTCM in the summer of 1998 and the bail-in of the interbank creditors of Korean banks in the winter of 1997. I wrote in 2004 with Brad Setser an entire book titled “Bailouts versus Bailins: Responding to Financial Crises in Emerging Markets” that discusses these policy tradeoffs in financial crises where you have runs on the liquid liabilities of either illiquid and/or insolvent countries. Those were the international equivalent of the banks runs and financial crises that we are now seeing in the cases of Bear Stearns, Lehman and Fannie and Freddie.

Since government bailouts put at risk public money and create moral hazard Treasury and the Fed decided that they need to draw a line somewhere after the bailouts of Bear Stearns creditors, of Fannie and Freddie and all the other actions aimed at backstopping the financial system. These actions have included the creation of the TAF, TSLF, PDCF, the use of the FHLBs to provide liquidity to distressed mortgage lenders, the provision of Treasury liquidity to the FHLBs, the outright purchase of agency MBS by the Treasury, the swapping of two thirds of the safe Treasuries of the Fed for toxic illiquid securities of banks and non banks, etc. So after having created the mother of all moral hazard with their actions (including the biggest bailout of all, i.e. the rescue of Fannie and Freddie) the Fed and Treasury are playing a chicken game with the financial system. Tim Geithner told clearly to the heads of all the major Wall Street firms that if they pull the plug on Lehman and Lehman collapses they are next in line for a run on their institutions. So if a buyer for Lehman is not found (or even if it is found and the counterparty lines are still pulled) not only Lehman will collapse but the run will extend to all of the other major broker dealers and banks that are the counterparties of Lehman.

The Fed may delude itself in thinking – as its stress models suggest – that the systemic risk of a collapse of Lehman are less serious than those of Bear Stearns: afterall Lehman is less involved into CDSs than Bear was and now both Lehman and the other major broker dealers have access to the discount window with the PDCF. A collapse of Lehman instead will have as much of a systemic effect as the collapse of Bear for many reasons: Lehman is larger than Bear was; Lehman is a major player in a variety of key financial markets; all the other major Wall Street institutions are interconnected with Lehman in dozens of different types of counterparty activities; the PDCF support of the Fed is neither unlimited nor unconditional, i.e. investors cannot assume that Lehman or any other broker dealer can borrow unlimited amounts with no conditions from the discount window.