Thus was born the expression ‘too big to fail’. Prior to the current financial crisis many economists worried that bailing out failing investments skews the markets because if you know you won’t lose your money, you don’t need to worry about how much risk is involved in an investment. Economists call this problem ‘moral hazard’. But the bankruptcy of Lehman posed another hazard, that of a deflationary spiral where failing wages, high unemployment, and low interest rates provoke a recession that reinforces the conditions that brought the recession about in the first place.