The most surprising bit of news to come out of the Lehman coals being raked over is in the Guardian today, who say that Hank Paulson is blaming Alastair Darling for not voicing his concerns sooner over letting the bank fail; the UK’s banking elite believed that after Barclays’ attempts to take over the bank failed, the US government would provide support. Whatever the reason, the decision to let it fail has, with 20-20 hindsight, being given an unequivocal thumbs down, the FSA’s Hector Sants calling it a “mistake”, deputy Bank of England governor John Gieve calling it a “catastrophic error”. But if you remember Paulson’s press conference just weeks later when he announced that the Treasury was bailing out AIG, and his disbelieving, shaken delivery of that news, it’s easy to see that for a man like him, the idea of state and business joining hands was simply unthinkable, and was never going to happen.

When it fell, some of the big assets got quickly snapped up, like its European and Asian trading unit, which was bought by Nomura after they conducted a ceremony to ward off evil spirits in the Canary Wharf building (there must still be some bad juju floating around, as they’ve since moved, rent-free, nearer to the City). But other assets, like Lehman Brothers pens, are still hanging around a warehouse somewhere like a bad smell. Lehman have set up an eBay store to get rid of all this tat, which includes endless golfing paraphanalia, silver plated babies’ rattles, wine accessories and baby romper suits. “Own a piece of history” runs the tagline. As well as this desperately small change, they’re also collating rather more valuable assets, like the uranium they own.

Maybe once they’ve sold all the leather paperweights they’ll have enough to pay off the potential $100bn they owe to over 100 different claimants, for any number of different services, trades and deals that were going on at the time of the bankruptcy. PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the administrator for the bank, is filing its claim in a couple of weeks, just over a year after the bank fell. 

Also in a commemorative mood are the BBC. They’ve got Robert Peston currently filming in New York to mark the big day, radio play The Day That Lehman Died broadcasting tomorrow on the World Service, and glossy-looking The Last Days Of Lehman Brothers on BBC2, starring Corey Johnson as Dick Fuld and James Cromwell looking like he’s in full ball-crushing 24/LA Confidential mode as Hank Paulson. Expect lots of shakycam closeups of people sweating into phones intercut with placid brooding faces gazing out of reflective glass.

As for us, we’ll be marking the anniversary of the financial crisis in a few weeks in a very exciting way. Keep your eyes peeled for more news as Bad Idea steps up a gear…

Peston was blamed for the queues outside Northern Rock after he revealed the bank’s woes to the nation, as well as for the rise in HBOS’s share price after Peston revealed they were going to be taken over by Lloyds. More specifically, he was accused of being a pawn in some insider trading scam, with a mole feeding him information that would affect the markets. It was an accusation that George Osbourne ratified and then Peston, with typical aplomb, deflected with the Deripaska-Rothschild-Osbourne yacht scoop, while the FT defended Pesto to the hilt.

Still, the criticisms haven’t gone away. “Newspapers have the same sort of obligation as they do during a war”, said Simon Jenkins on the media’s role in the crisis, i.e. shut up and not “scare” people. Jenkins of course chose instead, on the day of the worst stock market fall in years, to romp up Cader Idris and uncork his babbling, Biblical prose. How responsible of him!

So Peston faced the committee yesterday, and he rebuffed the criticisms in a hyper-Pestonian manner. This was Pesto off the leash, allowed to roam free over vowels and clauses, a style described politely as “loquacious” by the Guardian and perhaps more accurately as having “sentences like giant sausages” by Quentin Letts in the Mail. “I know lots and lots and lots of people, including you, and, y’know, I talk to lots and lots and lots of people”, was his version of refusing to outline his sources. Slick.

The main thing is that Northern Rock was screwed even if Peston did create a run on it, something that the other journos at the hearing all concurred with. Jenkins’s wider notion of not reporting financial stories to maintain market stability is flawed too, as transparency moves to the front of the agenda. Jenkins, for his part, kept pretty quiet at the meetings, only piping up to tell the assembled committee kettles that they were black: ”By an extraordinary coincidence you have all five journalists here who predicted the credit crunch. What have you been doing all the time?” Well, at least they haven’t been telling people to “invest in sanity” and buy “shares in kindness, with a side bet on courtesy and brotherly love”. If only we’d just given Fred The Shred a nice big hug, then none of this horridness would have happened!

Peston, meanwhile, nailed the whole conundrum when he says that impact upon share price is “peripheral” to the provision of information to the masses. That’s what journalism is – can you remember that far back, Jenkins?

We all know that 2009 is shaping up to be a box of horrors for media companies who rely on advertising revenue (i.e. almost all of them, excepting the BBC). But yesterday Guardian executive Emily Bell painted a bleaker picture still, telling the Polis thinktank:

“We are on the brink of two years of carnage for western media. In the UK, five nationals could go out of business and we could be left with no UK-owned broadcaster outside of the BBC.”

Eek. But which five? The obvious candidates are the Daily Star, the Daily Sport, and the Daily Express (which is down 9.3% on sales this year), all of which are owned by pornographer/mogul Richard Desmond, and also the People, which apparently still exists (no, me either). The Independent, sad to say, is not looking too healthy either with its circulation shrinking to approximately 145,000, down 14.5% on last year. There must be some encouraging signs though, right?

Er, no, says Bell.

“This is systematic collapse not just a cyclical downturn,” she said, before predicting that we will increasingly see a “superstar culture” in the media, with journalists like BBC business pin-up Robert Peston rising up like a well-groomed meteor.

In short then, television and newspapers are doomed, and Robert Peston is, like, so hot right now. Is there no limit to this man’s powers?