Who knows how  big Hank Paulson's experiment in letting Lehman Brothers fail will cost?

Efluxmedia wrote:

A legendary US institution, Lehman employs about 25,000 people and reported debts of more than 600 billion dollars as it filed for bankruptcy Monday in a Manhattan court.

Apart from its debts, Lehman was valued at about 637 billion dollars in its bankruptcy filing. Its share price plunged 95 per cent. 

Lehman Brothers was an international player.  Look what just showed up on last Friday via The GuardianUK's report of Lehman's European operation:

Speaking after the first creditors meeting, a team from PriceWaterhouseCoopers said they had identified more than $1tn in assets and liabilities which need to be accounted for.

At the meeting, held behind closed doors in a conference hall at the O2 dome, lead administrator Tony Lomas told hundreds of representatives and lawyers who attended that he had recovered about $5bn out of a potential $550bn of obligations owing to creditors. A further $22.3bn of client assets had been identified, all of which will be returned to their owners.

That's right a 1,000,000,000,000 dollars.  Perhaps Mr. Buffet was presicent in stating that "derivatives were “financial weapons of mass destruction”

Meanwhile the Dow jumps up with the news that CitiGroup will cut 20 percent of it's workforce.  So 53,000 people will lose their jobs from 250,000 CitiGroup employs worldwide.