Before the global financial crisis, which began in 2007, Lehman Brothers was a fabled New York-based brokerage firm and investment bank. Founded 157 year earlier, it had survived the American civil wars, the major economic depressions of the 19th and 20th centuries, and two world wars. By 2007, it was the fourth largest investment bank in the United States: only Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch were bigger. But that was not to last much longer.