36 Hours of Alarm and Action as Crisis Spiraled - NYTimes.com:
The real problem was that a handful of hedge funds that used the firm’s London office to handle their trades had billions of dollars in balances frozen in the bankruptcy.
Diamondback Capital Management, for instance, a $3 billion hedge fund, told its investors that 14.9 percent of its assets were locked up in the Lehman bankruptcy — money it could not extract. A number of other hedge funds were in the same predicament. (When called for comment, Diamondback officials did not respond.)
As this news spread, every other hedge fund manager had to worry about whether the balances they had at other Wall Street firms might suffer a similar fate. And Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were the two biggest firms left that served this back-office role. That is why Mr. Ackman’s investors were calling him. And that is what caused hedge funds to pull money out of Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, hedge their exposure by buying credit-default swaps that would cover losses if either firm couldn’t pay money they owed — or do both.
It was fear, not greed, that was driving everyone’s actions.
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