By 12/31/08, will Lehman Brothers fail?

No should be restated as : “Yes, and the FED bails them out in cocealed mode and nothing is visible to thegeenral public.”

i’m not really comfortable that the the whole range of possible outcomes is covered here. what if they just sell their asset management business? what if they split into to companies? what if the fed (or the treasury) intervenes in a way that isn’t obviously a bailout?

I think that I defer to the “WSJ” test. i.e. what does the front page of the WSJ call it?

No one is saying that selling %50 of Neuberger Berman is selling “Lehman”. Considering that fixed income, ibanking, and trading all remain (and loosing money, woot!), “lehman” remains.

I suppose “in their current form” is a little misleading.

I could add a “split” stock, but I would define it quite narrowly, i.e. it becomes two independant companies (i.e. not owned by a p.e. firm) that may or may not trade on the open markets. I’d say that is on the low end of probabilities.

What would you define as an “intervention {by the fed} that isn’t obviously a bailout”?

Again, I tend to defer to the WSJ test.

Well – the fed could broker a sale to some better-capitalized bank, like what happened with Bear except without the backstop.

The plan they floated today about creating a second entity to hold the commercial real estate portfolio sounds pretty split-ish.

Hrrrmmm… again, I defer to the WSJ test, but if it isn’t costing taxpayers a theoretical dime (and I assume that Hank Paulson works for peanuts, Bernanke for beard rubs), I don’t think you can call it a bailout. The backstop makes the difference between a bailout and a sale, n’est ce pas?