The 2008-2009 financial crisis timeline is forever engrained in the minds of most people on Wall Street.
It seemed like every day there was more monumental bad news.
Back then, I was a reporter on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. It seemed like every time I stepped in front of the camera I was reporting on yet another titanic event, that would go straight to the history books.
Events like the purchase of Bear Stearns by Action Alerts Plus holding JP Morgan Chase JPM on March 16, 2008 reigns supreme in my memories. As we all know, CEO Jamie Dimon swooped in there with a stock swap worth $2 a share, or less than 7% of Bear Stearns’ market value just two days before. TheStreet at the time called it a “fire-sale.”
Or how about the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Lehman was the fourth-largest financial services firm at the time and was founded in 1850. And then one day it was gone.
Here’s what TheStreet’s founder Jim Cramer remembers about the Lehman news.
Even Wall Street darling Goldman Sachs GS needed help from Warren Buffett, who ended up providing $5 billion in badly needed capital.
And then, the culmination of it all, was when Congress passed the historic $787 Economic Stimulus Package in February 2009. The so-called bailout was initiated by President Barack Obama, who was inaugurated just two months before.
But then things seemed to calm. Even the bank stocks started to rise. The Dow, S&P 500 and the Nasdaq all fell finally fell to the bottom.
From their cumulative peak on October 9, 2007 through that frightful day on March 9, 2009, the markets came crashing down:
Nasdaq was down 54.9%
S&P 500 down 56.8%
Dow was down 54.1%
And that changed history forever.
So where were you? And what have you learned since?
That’s exactly what we asked our newsroom. You’ll hear from:
Chairman Larry Kramer
Senior Editor John Pickering
Executive Editor Brian Sozzi
Technology Editor Nelson Wang
Action Alerts Plus Research Analyst Zev Fima
Senior Correspondent Scott Gamm
And then let us know where you were.
The video was directed and produced by TheStreet’s Justin Ho, an award winning NY filmmaker.
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