I blogged before that I think the decision to let Lehman fail will be debated for years. It's possible that could be pegged as the moment that really intensified the credit crisis.

Today Ben Bernanke added some insight to the debate.

Here's what he had to say:

Attempts to organize a consortium of private firms to purchase or recapitalize Lehman were unsuccessful. With respect to public-sector solutions, we determined that either facilitating a sale of Lehman or maintaining the company as a free-standing entity would have required a very sizable injection of public funds--much larger than in the case of Bear Stearns--and would have involved the assumption by taxpayers of billions of dollars of expected losses. Even if assuming these costs could be justified on public policy grounds, neither the Treasury nor the Federal Reserve had the authority to commit public money in that way; in particular, the Federal Reserve's loans must be sufficiently secured to provide reasonable assurance that the loan will be fully repaid. Such collateral was not available in this case. Recognizing that Lehman's potential failure posed risks to market functioning, the Federal Reserve sought to cushion the effects by implementing a number of measures, including substantially broadening the collateral accepted by the Fed's Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) and Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) to ensure that the remaining primary dealers would have uninterrupted access to funding.