Editor’s Note: This story originally published on September 14, 2018.

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Legendary investment bank Lehman Brothers was on fire — and no one was coming to put it out.

Bank of America refused to rescue the 158-year-old Wall Street firm without support from Uncle Sam. The British government wouldn’t let Barclays (BCS) buy Lehman Brothers and its toxic balance sheet. And Washington decided against another politically unpopular bailout.

So Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail. At 1:45 a.m. on Monday, September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

What ensued was the largest and most complex bankruptcy in American history. But that doesn’t do justice to the damage Lehman’s demise caused the financial system. The implosion of Lehman Brothers — and the mayhem it unleashed — was the most terrifying moment for business and the US economy since the Great Depression.

“It was the moment when the financial crisis fully burst upon us, when panic seized the markets,” Phil Angelides, who led the official bipartisan inquiry into the 2008 meltdown, told CNN.

Lehman’s failure shook Wall Street to its core. The Dow plummeted 504 points, the equivalent of 1,300 points today. Some $700 billion vanished from retirement plans and other investment funds. The panic that followed plunged the American economy into a severe downturn, now known as the Great Recession.

Today, Lehman Brothers and its CEO Dick Fuld are the poster children for the reckless risk-taking that wrecked the economy.

Lehman’s final days were marked by frantic last-minute negotiations over its fate.

Right up until the end, everyone thought someone would rescue Lehman Brothers: Surely the firm wouldn’t be allowed to fail. Bear Stearns, a smaller investment bank, had been saved just six months earlier by Washington and JPMorgan Chase.

On Wednesday, September 10, South Korea’s Korean Development Bank dropped out of the running to be Lehman Brothers’ white knight. The news — combined with Lehman’s announcement of a record $3.9 billion quarterly loss — sent the bank’s shares cratering 45%.

With South Korea out, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson called Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis to ask him to find a creative way to buy Lehman Brothers. Put on your “imagination hat,” Paulson urged Lewis.

But by Friday, September 12, Bank of America said it was bowing out unless the government was willing to help. Lehman was simply stuck with too many “illiquid” mortgage assets, and it couldn’t sell them quickly enough to meet other obligations. Bank of America decided instead to buy the next investment bank in line to fail: Merrill Lynch.

“You just didn’t know what was going to happen when you got into work on Monday,” said Brady Kim, who worked as an analyst on Lehman’s trading desk. “Were you going to be working for Barclays? Some Korean conglomerate?”

The one option few saw coming was bankruptcy. “They’re not just going to let the bank go under,” Kim said.

That Friday evening, Paulson ordered the heads of the big Wall Street firms to meet at the New York Fed’s headquarters. They were told to come up with a private-sector solution to save Lehman.

American officials had little appetite for another bailout. They had just seized control of teetering mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the weekend before. Fed officials said Paulson made it clear there would be no government help this time, “not a penny.”

Saturday brought an apparent breakthrough for Lehman: Barclays agreed to buy Lehman — as long as Wall Street would take some assets off its hands. But the Barclays deal went up in smoke on Sunday when UK regulators balked at blessing the risky deal.

“Imagine if I said yes to a British bank buying a very large American bank which … collapsed the following week,” Alistair Darling, the UK’s chancellor of the exchequer, later told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

‘It was pandemonium up there’

With no buyers left, regulators pressured Lehman Brothers to file for bankruptcy on Sunday night, before trading opened in the morning.

Lehman’s lawyers and executives left the New York Fed to inform the board that no rescue was coming.

“We went back to the headquarters, and it was pandemonium up there,” Harvey Miller, the bankruptcy counselor for Lehman Brothers, later told investigators.

The Fed rejected a last-minute Lehman plea for additional assistance from the central bank, leading to the early-morning bankruptcy.

The collapse shocked employees.

“I never thought the company would go out of business. It was terrible,” said James Chico, who worked as an analyst in the back office at Lehman for more than two decades.

Tom Rogers was on his honeymoon in St. Lucia when the bank, his employer for seven years, went bust.

“I came back, and it was just mass chaos,” said Rogers, who started as an intern at Lehman and moved up to senior analyst in the firm’s reinsurance business.

The turmoil showed just how fragile and interconnected the entire system was. The situation was exacerbated by the near-collapse of AIG, the insurance behemoth. Regulators feared AIG’s demise would bring down the whole system — so AIG was given a $182 billion bailout.

Fear and panic quickly spread through the financial system, causing credit markets to freeze. Even large and iconic industrial companies such as General Motors were unable to receive short-term funding.

“The financial crisis reached cataclysmic proportions with the collapse of Lehman Brothers,” the crisis inquiry commission concluded.

Fuld, who had infamously told shareholders in April 2008 that “the worst is behind us,” emerged as one of the villains of the crisis. He steered Lehman right into the face of an epic storm.

Between 2000 and 2007, Lehman’s assets had more than tripled to $691 billion. And its borrowing ratio, known as leverage, jumped to 40 times its shareholders’ equity in the company. The firm had relatively little capital to protect against trouble.

Madelyn Antoncic, Lehman’s chief risk officer from 2004 to 2007, tried and failed to warn Fuld against taking on more mortgage risk.

“At the senior level, they were trying to push so hard that the wheels started to come off,” Antoncic told the commission.

For his part, Fuld told lawmakers in 2008 that the pain of Lehman’s failure “will stay with me for the rest of my life.”

The former Lehman Brothers boss, who made and lost a $1 billion fortune on Wall Street, has made few public appearances since the crisis. He did speak at a 2015 event where he admitted he would do some things differently.

“I missed the violence of the market and how it spread from one asset class to the next,” Fuld said.

Fuld doesn’t deserve all the blame. The firm’s demise underscored the wild risk-taking that regulators and CEOs had allowed to become rampant across Wall Street.

Consider, for example, the 2000 deregulation of exotic financial instruments known as derivatives. Regulators had little window into how these trades linked banks to one another. When one bank failed, other financial institutions fell in a kind of domino effect.

Even a month before Lehman’s bankruptcy, officials at the Fed were still seeking information on the bank’s 900,000 derivative contracts. And they were clueless about the risk posed by AIG’s enormous book of derivatives.

“The people charged with overseeing our financial system were flying blind as the crisis developed,” Angelides said.

Only in 2010, with the passage of the sweeping Dodd-Frank financial reform law, were derivatives required to be bought and sold on exchanges.

Regulators also failed to get Lehman Brothers to slow its headfirst dive into mortgages. The firm kept buying real estate assets well into the first quarter of 2008.

The Treasury Department’s Office of Thrift Supervision didn’t issue a report warning of Lehman’s “outsized bet” on commercial real estate until two months before its collapse. The OTS was abolished by Dodd-Frank.

Likewise, the SEC declined to call Lehman Brothers out for exceeding risk limits — even though the agency was aware.

“The SEC…knew of the firm’s disregard of risk management,” the commission said.

Lehman Brothers also got away with using accounting gimmicks to mask how much money it borrowed. Bart McDade, Lehman’s president and chief operating officer, wrote in an email at the time that the accounting maneuvers are “another drug we R on.”

Economists will debate for decades whether Washington should have rescued Lehman to prevent the chaos that followed. Former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke maintains that regulators had no authority to lend to a failing Lehman.

“We essentially had no choice and had to let it fail,” Bernanke told the commission.

But others say Bernanke and Paulson should have realized that allowing Lehman to fail would deepen the crisis.

“Our regulatory system is made of humans — and humans make mistakes,” said James Angel, a business professor at Georgetown University. “The Fed clearly could have done a better job of containing the damage.”

The inconsistent response by Washington — deciding not to rescue Lehman after saving Bear and before helping AIG — “added to uncertainty and panic,” the financial crisis inquiry concluded.

Today’s financial system is safer thanks to the reforms put in place after 2008. Banks have bulked up on vast amounts of capital. Regulators are more vigilant.

But some worry about the risk of another downturn, even if it doesn’t start with banks.

“I’m concerned about now,” said famed Yale professor Robert Schiller, pointing to “highly priced” stocks and rising home values.

“We’re already in for what could be a repeat of 2008,” Shiller said. “It will look different this time, but there could be a decline in home prices and recession coming in.”

Let’s hope the lessons from the last crisis haven’t been forgotten.

A Decade Later: It’s been 10 years since the financial crisis rocked America’s economy. In a special yearlong series, CNN will examine the causes of the crisis, how the country is still feeling its effects, and the lessons we have — and have not — learned.

What trade war? The Dow just soared to its first record high since late January.

The milestone shows that Wall Street is mostly unfazed by the escalating trade clash between the United States and China.

The Dow’s 251-point leap on Thursday marked its 100th record close since President Donald Trump’s election, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices. The S&P 500 also notched an all-time high.

The Dow closed at 26,657. It has spiked about 3,300 points since a low on April 2, when investors were more worried about trade. They’re betting that the strong US economy will power through the outbreak of tariffs.

“The market is showing incredible strength,” said Paul Hickey, co-founder of Bespoke Investment Group.

Stocks spiked late last year and in January after Republicans enacted a sweeping corporate tax cut. The euphoria sent the Dow soaring from 25,000 to 26,000 in just seven trading days. Even market optimists were questioning whether stock valuations had gotten out of hand.

“In January, it felt like the market was bulletproof,” said Dan Suzuki, portfolio strategist at Richard Bernstein Advisors. “That’s no longer the case.”

Eventually, that rally crumbled in dramatic fashion, punctuated by two single-day 1,000-point plunges. Wall Street was overcome by fears about inflation and spiking interest rates. It was the scariest moment for US investors in years.

“Sentiment had gotten really out of hand. The pullback was a reality check. The lack of a new high for so long has let the market play catchup to fundamentals,” Hickey said.

And the fundamentals look very good. Corporate earnings have gone through the roof, thanks to strong economic growth and the corporate tax cut. The unemployment rate has dropped to just 3.9%. And US economic growth has climbed to an annualized pace of 4.2%.

“What matters most to investors is corporate profits,” Suzuki said. “The profit trends are healthy — and accelerating. That’s tremendously bullish for US stocks.”

CNNMoney (New York) First published September 20, 2018: 9:58 AM ET

It’s a good day for OPEC.

Data published Monday by the oil cartel show its members have largely complied with an agreement to slash production.

The confirmation caps a remarkable year for OPEC, which was forced to devise a plan to boost prices after they fell to $26 per barrel in February 2016.

The price collapse — to levels not seen since 2003 — was caused by months of growing oversupply, slowing demand from China and a decision by Western powers to lift Iran’s nuclear sanctions.

Since then, the market has mounted a stunning turnaround, with crude prices doubling to trade at $53.50 per barrel.

Here’s how major oil producers worked together to push prices higher:

OPEC agreed major production cuts in November, hoping to tame the global oil oversupply and support prices.

The news of the deal immediately boosted prices by 9%.

Investors cheered even more after several non-OPEC producers, including Russia, Mexico and Kazakhstan, joined the effort to restrain supply.

Crucially, the deal has stuck. The OPEC report published Monday showed that its members have — for the most part — fulfilled their pledges to slash production. The International Energy Agency agrees: It estimated OPEC compliance for January at 90%.

UAE energy minister Suhail Al Mazrouei told CNNMoney on Monday that the results were even better than he had expected.

The production cuts total 1.8 million barrels per day and are scheduled to run for six months.

Related: OPEC has pulled off one of its ‘deepest’ production cuts

The OPEC deal took months to negotiate, and investors really, really like it. The number of hedge funds and other institutional investors that are betting on higher prices hit a record in January, according to OPEC.

The widespread optimism is helping to fuel price increases.

The latest data from OPEC and the IEA show that global demand for oil was higher than expected in 2016, thanks to stronger economic growth, higher vehicle sales and colder than expected weather in the final quarter of the year.

Demand is set to grow further in 2017 to an average of 95.8 million barrels a day, compared 94.6 million barrels per day in 2016.

The IEA said that if OPEC sticks to its agreement, the global oil glut that has plagued markets for three years will finally disappear in 2017.

Saudi oil minister: I don’t lose sleep over shale

Despite the stunning growth, analysts caution that prices may not go much higher.

That’s because higher oil prices are likely to lure American shale producers back into the market. The total number of active oil rigs in the U.S. stood at 591 last week, according to data from Baker Hughes. That’s 152 more than a year ago.

U.S. crude stockpiles swelled in January to nearly 200 million barrels above their five-year average, according to the OPEC report.

“This vast increase in inventories is a result of a strong supply response from the U.S. shale producers, who were not involved in the OPEC agreement and who have instead been using the resultant price rally to increase output,” said Fiona Cincotta, an analyst at City Index.

More supply could once again put OPEC under pressure.

CNNMoney (London) First published February 13, 2017: 9:13 AM ET

Bond yields in the United States have been rising.

But investors aren’t freaking out. The Dow and S&P 500 both hit all-time highs last week — and the Nasdaq is not far from a record, either.

The 10-Year Treasury yield is still relatively low, but it has topped the psychologically important 3% threshold and is currently hovering around 3.1%.

The concern is that this may be just the beginning. Longer-term rates could keep climbing given that the Federal Reserve is expected to raise short-term rates Wednesday.

At some point, investors may start to grow wary of what rising rates will mean for consumer spending and businesses looking to borrow more money. Higher rates, in theory, should lead to slower growth for both the economy and corporate earnings.

The question is: how many more rate hikes are coming? Fed chair Jerome Powell may provide some clues at a press conference after the Fed decision is announced.

Craig Birk, chief investment officer of Personal Capital, said that the market should be able to handle a few more quarter-point rate increases. But many investors may have gotten spoiled since rates were unusually low for so long.

The federal funds rate is now in a range of 1.75% to 2% and there are expectations it could climb above 3% over the next year. Birk said many investors are hoping the Fed will end its rate hiking campaign in 2019 though.

“We finally have a real interest rate, not one that’s just zero,” Birk said. “The Fed is still saying that they will likely raise rates slowly and steadily but the market seems to be betting they will stop sooner.”

Birk added the Fed had been run by so-called doves, people like former Fed chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen who preferred to keep rates low, for years. Investors are trying to adjust to the new mindset at the Fed.

“The market is still getting used to the idea that the Fed will be more balanced and more hawkish,” Birk said.

In other words, investors may be underestimating the willingness of the Fed to keep raising rates — despite criticism from President Donald Trump about rate hikes and even if the data doesn’t conclusively show inflation picking up in a meaningful way.

Still, some experts think the Fed is likely to stick to its path of gradual rate increases. Powell, like his predecessors, is probably not interested in rattling the bond and stock markets with surprise moves.

“We do not see rising interest rates as a reason to sell stocks, particularly in the absence of runaway inflation,” wrote John Lynch, chief investment strategist for LPL Financial, in a report Tuesday.

Inflation is still under control for now

Wage growth is picking up, but that hasn’t led to a big spike in consumer prices. So the Fed may still have some wiggle room to keep raising rates since the economy appears to be on solid footing.

“The market is interpreting higher rates as a response to better growth, not as a reason to fear a policy mistake, which we find encouraging,” Lynch added.

Ed Keon, chief investment strategist at QMA, isn’t overly worried about inflation getting out of control either.

“It’s premature to say the Fed is behind the curve,” said Keon. “The question is what happens next year and 2020. There are some reasons to believe price pressures may continue to build. I don’t think rates will get too high.”

Keon thinks the 10-Year Treasury yield could climb to a range of about 3.25% to 3.5%. That’s still low enough to keep the economy humming along at a relatively solid clip, even if growth slows a bit.

So the biggest change that might come from the Fed’s rate hikes is a shift in the types of stocks that investors favor most. Tech stocks, retailers and other consumer companies, big winners of the past year, may start to lose some ground to financials.

Yousef Abbasi, global market strategist with INTL FCStone, is bullish on regional bank stocks (KRE) and Bank of America (BAC), which has a big mortgage business. They should benefit from higher rates since it will make their lending operations more profitable.

CNNMoney (New York) First published September 25, 2018: 11:48 AM ET

Nordstrom. Neiman Marcus. TJ Maxx. And now, Sears and Kmart.

Sears Holdings, the company that owns retail stores Sears and Kmart, reportedly said this weekend that it would remove 31 Trump-branded items from its website.

The company pulled the products as part of a plan to focus on its “most profitable items,” Sears spokesman Brian Hanover told Reuters.

Hanover told the news organization that items in the Trump Home line of furnishings were removed from the company’s website, although they could still be purchased through third-party vendors online. Neither store carried the items in their physical stores, he said.

Searches of the Sears and KMart websites did not turn up Trump Home products, except for those sold by third-party vendors.

In a statement Monday, spokesman Chris Brathwaite distanced Sears from any political controversy and reiterated that many Trump-branded products are still available through third-party sellers.

“In this case, certain products were removed from our websites that included a very small number of Trump products,” he said. “The headlines do not do justice to our business or this specific brand of products that we offer through our marketplace sellers.”

Brathwaite added that the company prefers to focus on its business and “leave the politics to others.”

Related: Is Ivanka Trump’s brand losing its bling?

The move makes Sears the latest to ditch products bearing the Trump name.

Earlier this month, Nordstrom (JWN) cited brand “performance,” not politics, as the reason why it decided to stop carrying Ivanka Trump’s clothing and accessories label.

President Trump knocked the department store on Twitter in retaliation. Nordstrom stock jumped 7% in the first two days following the tweet.

Other stores have also sought to distance themselves from Ivanka Trump’s brand.

Neiman Marcus removed the brand landing page from its website, and declined to tell CNNMoney whether it intended to keep Ivanka Trump products in stores or resume online sales in the future.

TJX Companies (TJX), the company that owns TJ Maxx and Marshalls, also said that it had recently told workers not to highlight the first daughter’s brand in stores.

And retailer Belk said last week that it planned to pull Ivanka Trump’s products from its website, but would continue to offer the line in its flagship stores.

Ivanka Trump’s clothing and accessories line has taken a hit in recent months.

Online sales of her brand dipped 26% in January compared to a year earlier, according to Slice Intelligence, a retail analysis firm. Slice studied the brand’s sales on five online stores: Nordstrom, Amazon, Zappos, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s.

Online sales of Ivanka’s brand had surged in late 2015, and last month’s numbers appear to be more of a “return to reality,” according to Taylor Stanton, Slice’s marketing and communications manager. The brand’s dip in performance was abnormal in light of an uptick in 2016 online sales in the apparel and accessories category, said Jack Beckwythe, a Slice analyst.

Related: Kellyanne Conway unrepentant for Ivanka Trump plug

The Ivanka Trump brand has defended its performance.

Rosemary Young, senior director of marketing at Ivanka Trump, told CNNMoney last week that the brand was growing and experienced “significant year-over-year revenue growth in 2016.”

“We believe that the strength of a brand is measured not only by the profits it generates, but the integrity it maintains,” Young said.

Retailers like Bloomingdale’s, Amazon (AMZN), Lord & Taylor, Macy’s (M) and Zappos all still carry Ivanka Trump products.

Ivanka Trump has taken a leave of absence from her namesake company since her father won the presidency. She has no formal role in the administration but is expected to have a voice on issues such as women’s empowerment and child care.

–CNNMoney’s Jackie Wattles contributed to this story.

CNNMoney (New York) First published February 12, 2017: 3:35 PM ET

General Electric, once America’s most valuable company, is now in sharp decline.

In a year full of dubious landmarks, GE has encountered another: The storied conglomerate is now worth less than $100 billion. That hasn’t happened since March 2009 — during the Great Recession.

GE’s (GE) stock crash — down by nearly two-thirds since the end of 2016 — has knocked the company down to the 59th most valuable in the S&P 500.

It’s a stunning reversal. GE was No. 1 in the S&P 500 as recently as 2004, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices. At the time, it was worth nearly $400 billion. Now GE is worth just a tenth of Apple (AAPL), the $1 trillion top dog of the market, and it’s fallen behind Salesforce (CRM), PayPal (PYPL) and Nvidia (NVDA).

GE’s struggles got it kicked out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average this summer. GE was an original member of the exclusive index in 1896 and had been in it continuously for 110 years.

Plunging profits and mounting debt have driven GE’s shares down by 35% this year. Only four S&P 500 companies have had a worse 2018.

The most remarkable part about GE’s decline is it comes at a time when the American economy and stock market are soaring. Rival industrial companies including Honeywell (HON) and United Technologies (UTX) are booming.

But GE has been hobbled by years of poorly timed deals and needless complexity that have finally come home to roost. To pay off debt and jump-start the stock, GE is selling off countless businesses, including its century-old railroad division, Thomas Edison’s light-bulb unit, Baker Hughes and the health-care unit that makes MRI machines.

Selling in GE’s stock has accelerated in recent days because of worries about GE Power, the most troubled part of the slumping conglomerate. GE confirmed last week that two of its gas turbines failed, forcing the closure of power plants.

The turbine trouble could hurt the company’s reputation and sales at a time when it’s already strapped for cash.

In a statement, GE said that it has “identified a fix” and has been working with customers to “quickly return units to service.”

JPMorgan Chase analyst C. Stephen Tusa, Jr, Wall Street’s biggest GE bear, told clients the turbine failure “raises red flags” about GE Power.

Others think that shareholders are overreacting. Most likely, GE’s “fundamental technology is sound” and repair costs will be “manageable,” Bank of America analyst Andrew Obin wrote to clients.

CNNMoney (New York) First published September 26, 2018: 10:32 AM ET

To tackle Thailand’s mounting trash problem, one company is turning to the country’s plant life.

Universal Biopack makes packaging that it sells to restaurants and manufacturers. But rather than plastic, it uses a mixture of bamboo and cassava, crops that are widely found across the country.

After growing rapidly in recent decades, Thailand has become one of Asia’s biggest economies. But like many other countries in the region, it’s been slow to try to combat the millions of tons of trash produced each year.

“Waste management is a big problem everywhere,” said Universal Biopack’s managing director, Vara-Anong Vichakyothin.

Related: The company turning 4 billion plastic bottles into clothes

The company is using a technology devised at a Bangkok university to make its zero-waste packaging. It hopes it will eventually replace many of the Styrofoam boxes and plastic bags that end up in huge garbage dumps across Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries.

Its eco-friendly formula took five years to develop and is so adaptable it could end up being used to package things like furniture and even phones. The bamboo it uses comes from leftover scraps from the chopstick manufacturing process.

In the cities of Bangkok and Chiang Mai, where takeout drink containers and noodle packets line the sidewalks, the company supplies restaurants, organic farmers and other businesses in the food and drink industry.

But finding new clients can be tricky.

Takeout food vendors in Thailand want to keep costs down in a competitive business with thin margins. Asking them to spend more on packaging for environmental reasons is a tough sell.

“The local economy still does not support [this technology]” said Universal Biopack’s founder, Suthep Vichakyothin.

But that hasn’t stopping other companies from entering the sustainable packaging market in Thailand. Like Universal Biopack, they’re betting on growing environmental awareness eventually leading to an increase in demand.

To become more competitive, Suthep’s company is investing. It’s aiming to ramp up production by building a partially automated assembly line at its factory near Bangkok and doubling its staffing from 50 people to 100.

The goal is to increase monthly capacity from 300,000 units to one million.

Related: A startup that makes pencils that grow into vegetables

A lot of the demand comes from overseas. One of its customers uses the natural packaging for coconut water it exports.

Universal Biopack says it’s also getting interest in its products from other countries, particularly in Scandinavia.

CNNMoney (Hong Kong) First published February 12, 2017: 9:08 PM ET