Exploring the Ruins of Lehman.com

Lehman Brothers, at the domain lehman.com, is of course the giant investment bank that was allowed to fail, tipping the global financial system into chaos and collapse. The company is now in a state of bankruptcy, but its sprawling website appears much as it was before the end came.

Check out Lehman.com's History Timeline: it carefully records every detail of Lehman's existence but only through 2007. The site's Awards and Recognition page is another eerie area. Right up to the end of its existence, the firm appears to have been such accolades as "Best Credit Derivative House." Perhaps the ghostliest area of Lehman.com is its Careers page, where an invitation to "Begin Your Journey" and "Engage Your Passion" rotates undeterred by events. Similarly, the firm's Intellectual Capital section is months out of date.

Lehman.com has become unstuck in time, and while it's perhaps disingenous to expect that a lowly HTML coder would have been retained merely to update these sections, but the lack of closure is stunning.