If early last September you’d parked outside Lehman Brothers’ Manhattan headquarters with a cell-phone scanner and listened only to some of the “chatter” coming out of Lehman’s front office, you almost certainly would have realized that Lehman was going under. But to understand the wider consequences, how capitalism was about to do a somersault into the watery abyss, you would have needed to understand how Lehman fit into the global financial system
