June 4, 2008 | posted by Michael Baxter in Banking |

Listen very quietly and you can hear the sound of Queen over the ether: “dum, dum, dum, dum,  another one bites the dust.”

Okay, the dust has not yet been bitten, but it  feels like it.

There was Northern Rock, and Bear Stearns – they really did bite dust – then Bradford and Bingley did a passing imitation of it.  Yesterday it was back to the US, and this time the rumour mill has thrown up Lehman.

It is not the first time – the US investment bank was subject to rumours earlier this year.   And whether the mills are true or not, one thing is for sure, yesterday the company sure “needed to find someone to love” it, as the share price fell 10 per cent on rumours it had run out of money.

Paolo Tonucci, Treasurer at the bank, was quick to the denial: “We did not access the primary broker-dealer facility,” he said. “The last time we accessed the facility was on 16 April for testing purposes. We ended the first quarter with liquidity of $34 billion and finished the second quarter with well over $40 billion,” he said emphatically.

Mind you it was all bad timing.  According to the Wall street Journal, the bank does want to raise money, and the falling share price is making this tricky – so it is turning its attention overseas, and is talking to an investor in Korea.

As we have said before, now is a good time to be buying US assets – they are going cheap, and maybe the likes of this Korean investor will look back upon this time and say, “It marks the point when we became ‘the champions’.”