Lehman is NOT big enough.

Which raises the question: how big is Too Big To Fail?

When I first started reporting on economics, I had no gut sense of what big numbers mean. I knew, of course, that a trillion is a thousand billion. A billion is a thousand million, et cetera. But I didn't have any sense of what those numbers really meant to the world economy.

Here's what I have learned:

A trillion is A LOT of money. How much? The whole global economy—all the money spent every day in every country in the world—is around 50 trillion. The U.S. economy is about a quarter of that: 13 trillion.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, together, held about 5 trillion dollars in debt. That's a lot. A lot. A lot a lot. These two companies—and they are private companies, even if they have a special status in the US legal system—were bigger than most countries.

Lehman is nowhere near that big. They are worth in the single- to double-digit billions (or they were). That's just not real money to the global economy.

So, no, they were not too big to fail.