When federal officials met with top Wall Street executives the weekend of September 13, they made one thing clear: The collapsing securities firm Lehman Brothers would not get the kind of taxpayer-backed bailout given to another Wall Street firm, Bear Stearns, just a few months earlier. That position forced Lehman into bankruptcy and drove another financial giant, Merrill Lynch, to sell itself to Bank of America at a fire-sale price. Wharton professors Richard Herring and Susan Wachter discuss the implications of the bailout with moderator Jeff Brown Which begs a question: If the federal government was now taking a hard line on bailouts, why did it step in only a week earlier to risk taxpayer money shoring up mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? (Yesterday’s AIG bailout is a whole other question. See our related podcast in this issue .) Was this government takeover, potentially costing taxpayers up to $200 billion, the right move? What comes next?…