STOCK HISTORY
Stock Graveyard: The Largest Bankruptcies in History
12 lessons from the costliest insolvencies of all time.
12
Cases documented
$700B+
Total damage
1998
Oldest case (LTCM)
2023
Newest case (SVB)
2023
Silicon Valley Bank
Damage: ~$15B (Eigenkapital)
The fastest bank failure in US history: 36 hours from solvent to dead.
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2022
FTX
Damage: ~$8B
Crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried burned $8 billion of customer funds in 9 days.
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2021
Greensill Capital
Damage: ~$10B
Supply-chain finance backed by Credit Suisse — burned in one week.
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2020
Wirecard
Damage: ~$25B
The largest accounting fraud in postwar German history.
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2018
Theranos
Damage: ~$10B (Höchstbewertung)
The Silicon Valley vision that reached a $9B valuation without a single working product.
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2008
Bear Stearns
Damage: ~$30B (Bewertungsverlust)
From $172 a share to $2 — the turning point of the global financial crisis.
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2008
Madoff Investment Securities
Damage: ~$65B (vermeintliches Vermögen)
The largest Ponzi scheme in history — undetected for 17 years.
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2008
Lehman Brothers
Damage: ~$691B (Bilanzsumme)
158 years of Wall Street history — wiped out in a single weekend.
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2002
WorldCom
Damage: ~$180B (Marktkap.)
$11 billion accounting fraud — the largest in US history (until Madoff).
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2001
Enron
Damage: ~$74B
The accounting fraud that took down an entire Big-5 audit firm with it.
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2000
Pets.com
Damage: ~$300M
The sock-puppet IPO: 9 months from Wall Street to liquidation.
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1998
Long-Term Capital Management
Damage: ~$4.6B
Two Nobel laureates and 100:1 leverage — Russia's default cleared the table.
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What they all had in common
- Aggressive growth + opaque balance sheets — almost every case had a phase of exponential growth that later turned out to be balance-sheet unsustainable (Wirecard, Enron, FTX, Greensill).
- Charismatic founder as single point of failure — One person (Markus Braun, Jeff Skilling, Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes) embodied the story and got an undeservedly long benefit of the doubt.
- Auditors / regulators failed or were overwhelmed — EY at Wirecard, Arthur Andersen at Enron, BaFin/SEC late to act. When the watchers slept, the market slept with them.
- Short sellers / journalists warned years ahead — At Wirecard, Enron, Madoff, Theranos individual people screamed 1–10 years before collapse. They were ignored or sued.
- Liquidity disappeared faster than solvency — Bear Stearns, SVB, Lehman: from "solvent" to "insolvent" often took just days once trust eroded. On the balance sheet, everything still looked green.
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