CNBC to Premiere CRISIS ON WALL STREET: THE WEEK THAT SHOOK THE WORLD on September 12th

On Wednesday, September 12 at 10pm ET/PT, CNBC presents "Crisis on Wall Street: The Week that Shook the World," the definitive televised account of the most tumultuous days of the historic financial crisis of 2008. Reported by Andrew Ross Sorkin, CNBC anchor and author of the groundbreaking best-seller "Too Big to Fail," this primetime documentary chronicles the fall of Lehman Brothers and details how the nation and the world came as close as ever to a full economic collapse.

Sorkin presents new and gripping interviews with those at the highest reaches of the U.S. government, as well as the CEOs of the nation's largest banks who gathered to try to save Lehman Brothers from failure. Wall Street chiefs Jamie Dimon, John Thain, John Mack and others describe dramatic, around-the-clock negotiations. Former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson describes the desperate moment when he realized that a Lehman bankruptcy could bring down the world's financial system. "I would think about, you know, Armageddon," he tells Sorkin. "I was saying to myself, you know, when Lehman went down-- if we don't have the authorities and we get-- a couple of other institutions to go down, how do we put the system back together again?"

The documentary brings viewers into THE ROOM where the bank CEOs met over one turbulent weekend in September of 2008. "We're facing this fragile, existential moment, dangerous moment," former president of the N.Y. Federal Reserve Tim Geithner tells Sorkin. "There are these institutions at the edge of failure. And what we're going to spend the weekend doing is to figure out, can we find a way to prevent those failures and protect the system from the consequences of failures?"

Minute-by-minute accounts by the bankers bring to life the maneuvering by Bank of America and then Barclays to buy Lehman Brothers, as well as the series of events that led to the purchase of Merrill Lynch, sparing its demise. Sorkin also captures the alarming moments when credit markets froze in the week after Lehman's fall, and the government's frantic efforts, through the controversial TARP program, to rescue the system from a complete meltdown.

To this day, the debate continues over whether the Federal Reserve should have stepped in to save Lehman Brothers, and whether they even had the authority to do so. Warren Buffett insists the legal argument should have been beside the point. "If I were chairman of the Fed," he tells Sorkin, "I think I would have done it whether I could do it or not. I mean... is the Supreme Court going to send down some guy to arrest me as president of the Fed?"

"Crisis on Wall Street: The Week that Shook the World," details the historic bankruptcy and cascade of events that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, told by those who shouldered the fate of the world's economy a decade ago. As an impressive cast of Wall Street's who's who gather to recall the nightmare that unfolded, Sorkin presses each of them with the looming question: Could a crisis of this magnitude happen again?

Andrew Ross Sorkin is correspondent and Executive Producer. James Segelstein is Senior Producer and Oliver Miede is Producer. Mitch Weitzner is Sr. Executive Producer and Vice-President of Long Form Programming. Nikhil Deogun is Senior Vice President and Editor in Chief of Business News for CNBC.

For more information including web extras, log on to: https://www.cnbc.com/crisis-on-wall-street/.

Follow @CNBCPrimeTV and @CNBC on Twitter, and join the conversation using hashtag #2008FinancialCrisis.

About CNBC:

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