THE ANNIVERSARY - AT 8:15 A.M. ET:  Today marks the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, known as "the day the bonuses stopped...for five minutes."  The collapse set off last year's financial panic, and essentially guaranteed the election of financial wizard and deeply experienced economic planner Barack Obama.

A year later the real economy, where people work honest jobs, is still in serious trouble, with unemployment expected to rise even further.  But Wall Street is doing just fine, with the Dow at exactly the same place it was the day before the Lehman fiasco.  Multimillion-dollar bonuses for work no one understands are back in style. 

Some had hoped that last year's bloodletting would lead to caution, reform and wisdom.  We don't make predictions here, but we do offer some assessments.  Throughout this last year we've been cautioning that hope for reform was absurd.  The culture of Wall Street, and the psychology of the personalities involved, all but preclude caution and responsibility.  Wall Street is not about the "free enterprise system," or building great companies.  Wall Street is about fast money.  As Felix Rohatyn, once of the Street's true statesmen, once said, the stock market is a casino.

Now, one year after the collapse, there are warnings all over the place that we can have another one.  CNBC's Charles Gasparino holds views that are being echoed elsewhere:

After each market implosion (in 1986-7 and 1994 and on through the 1998 LTCM crisis), Wall Street returned to risk on a larger scale — until the mother of all meltdowns swept the financial system this time last year. That crisis forced the feds to enact the mother of all bailouts — billions pumped into the banking system, with Uncle Sam becoming the largest shareholder of Citigroup, one of the world’s largest financial institutions — and declaring for the first time that the banking system officially is off limits to failure.

It is that declaration — made by then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and followed through by his successor Tim Geithner, about protecting “systemically important” institutions — that will guarantee future excessive risk taking and yet another financial implosion. In fact, the seeds of the next meltdown are already being sown.

And, from the New York Post:

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said the US has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system a year after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

"In the US and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger," Stiglitz told Bloomberg News in an interview yesterday in Paris. "The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis."

Welcome to the recovery.

September 14, 2009