By Pamela Gentry, Senior Political Producer

NEW  YORK (Sept. 16, 2008) – Monday night, I walked past the live trucks and reporters gathered on 7th Avenue as they posted watch in front of Lehman Brothers spectacular office building. 

The bank building near the heart of Times Square fits in with a dozen six-story video screens with rotating videos of landscapes from around the world. Tourists stopped to take pictures of the office building as if it would be gone tomorrow.  Some posed carefully for family photos, making sure to include the company’s name and date stamp in the picture.

Lehman Brothers has been in existence since 1844 when Henry Lehman immigrated from Rimpar, Germany, to Alabama.  Lehman began as a dry goods store that catered to local cotton farmers in Montgomery. The business evolved from a merchandising firm to a commodities broker, and then later into an underwriting company that helped finance construction of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Now one of the most well established and well respected businesses in the financial world, it is rocked by the credit crisis and the slumping housing market, the same problems facing many American families. On Monday, the 158-year-old investment bank filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York.

The problems on Wall Street placed the economy back on the frontburner by both campaigns today.  But you it’s clear the two candidates see the “problem” and the “solutions” completely differently.

Democratic nominee Barack Obama called the crisis “the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression,” in a statement and blamed the policies of the Bush administration.  During a campaign stop in Grand Junction, Colo., Obama said that his rival, John McCain, is out of touch and would follow the same failed Bush policies.

But McCain sees it differently, he told a crowd in Jacksonville, Fla., “Our economy, I think, still the fundamentals of our economy are strong. But these are very, very difficult times.”

“Eight years of policies that have shredded consumer protections, loosened oversight and regulation, and encouraged outsized bonuses to CEOs, while ignoring middle-class Americans, have brought us to the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.”  Obama said.

The Telegraph newspaper in London, reported, “By 9 a.m. yesterday [Monday] morning a trickle of figures carrying small cardboard boxes of belongings emerged from the Lehman Brothers London headquarters and headed for Canary Wharf station.”  Within hours it was a study stream.

Employees in London and other international offices were following the leads of their New York counterparts and joining the unemployment line.

It will be interesting to see who the American people selected in November to get them through these tough times.  
 

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