In 2005, years before the subprime mortgage crisis kicked off the Great Recession and led millions of Americans to lose their homes, Larry McDonald was a vice president at the infamous now-defunct global financial services firm Lehman Brothers. As a young trader he, along with many of his peers, warned that something was wrong in the real estate market that year. It “was living on borrowed time,” he would explain years later in a 2009 New York Times article, and Lehman Brothers “was headed directly for the biggest subprime iceberg ever seen.”
But McDonald’s bosses ignored his warnings, and the 158-year-old institution that was Lehman eventually went under in 2008 after the housing bubble cracked. The S&P 500 would go on to lose roughly 50% of its value in the 17-month bear market that ended in March 2009.
