Whether the Federal Reserve could have lent to Lehman Brothers in September 2008 is still disputed. One side holds that the Federal Reserve had the authority and the means, and that its stated reason for not lending, a lack of collateral, does not fit the evidence (Ball 2018). The other, in the account of the chairman of the day, holds that Lehman could not be saved lawfully for lack of collateral (Bernanke 2015). This article asks a narrower and earlier question: in their own public texts, at the time, how did the authorities write their power to lend and the limits of that power? It reads two primary texts at length: Alan Greenspan's testimony to the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services of 1 October 1998 on the private refinancing of Long-Term Capital Management, and the Federal Reserve Board's press release of Sunday 14 September 2008. Beside them it reads two modern summaries of the episodes published by Skeptron, a studio of the RISCON family, and a ledger built on them; Lombard Street (1873) frames the question only. The testimony writes the limit as a list of things not done, names in detail who bore the loss, and states a test for intervening; it cites no legal power. The release writes help to a class of dealers through widened collateral, names a date on which one exception ends, and is silent on lending to any single firm. The modern records keep the entities and the sums apart and drop the bearers and the dates. Neither text settles the Lehman dispute; both show where its terms were, and were not, written down.
Skeptron's record of Lehman holds two entities, keeping the holding company's bankruptcy of 15 September 2008 apart from its dealer subsidiary's use of the Federal Reserve's existing credit facilities, and this study does not say that Lehman as a whole received or was refused a loan.