Oh, good: someone else has noticed!

In Lehman’s Demise, Some Shades of Enron

Today's lesson:

Findings on Lehman Take Even Experts by Surprise
By MICHAEL J. de la MERCED, NYT
Published: March 12, 2010
... Based on standard repurchase agreements — short-term loans commonly used by many firms for daily financing needs, in which borrowers temporarily exchange assets in return for cash up front — Lehman took a particularly aggressive accounting approach to these transactions.

Here, the investment bank used repos to temporarily park assets off its books to make its end-of-quarter debt levels look better than they did — while calling them sales instead of loans.

Ah, yes: parking assets - disguised as 'sales' - to manipulate quarterly balance sheets!
Where have we seen this before?
ENRON! (see, e.g., "Nigerian Barges")

Again: to understand the collapse not only of Lehman, but of the U.S. financial system generally - READ ENRON!