Set a few days before the crash of one of the most important investment banks on Wall Street, Jonathan Dawe’s Nero and The Fall of Lehman Brothers draws on baroque opera rhetoric to tell this key chapter of the last great financial crisis.

Attiring the protagonists of these events with the antique masks of Nero, Seneca, Agrippina, and Poppea, Dawe creates a terrifically chaotic universe through which the tragedy of transaction and the game of high-finance power are revealed.