Today is Tuesday, September 15, 2020.

On this day in 2008, Financial Firm Lehman Brothers made the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history. Welcome to today in True Crime, a parcast original. Today recovering the

collapse of Lehman Brothers during the Great Recession.

Let's go back to London on the morning of September 15, 2008. Alex Sinart

Art heard the news as soon as he woke up.

Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

With 639 billion dollars in assets

and 619 billion dollars in debt,

it was the largest bankruptcy the US had ever seen.

Stunned, Cienart wasn't sure what to do.

As an associate at the financial firm, should he just go into the office as usual?

Would the office even be open?

There weren't any guidelines for this.

So Sinart, who had recently returned to the London

headquarters from an orientation in Manhattan headed into the office anyway.

Sinart, a South African native,

had only worked at Lehman Brothers since June of 2008.

The 158-year-old Investment Bank was the fourth largest in the U.S.

Sinart was honored to be among its 25,000 employees, but talk of the firm's end had intensified

throughout the summer due to the subprime mortgage crisis.

In a somewhat simplified version of events,

the mid-2000s witnessed increasing housing demand and rising home prices in the US, which caused banks

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