Lehman Brothers shares dropped 45% on Tuesday, leading the stock market on the whole to decline by almost 3.5%.

I was expecting a lot more drama and to-do about Lehman Brother's tribulations, and was surprised at the comparatively small amount of press that it got, at least compared to the Fannie Mae bailout and Bear Stearns a while back. In a flight of Sherlock Holmes-ian fancy, I hopped onto the information superhighway (specific destination: Google) to try to solve the mystery.

One of the search results was a blog on the Wall Street Journal that did a great deal to explain why the Lehman Brothers issues are small potatoes in the world of journalism. If you're truly interested in this kind of thing, please read the whole post here.

For those who want the Cliff Notes version, here goes. On a personal level, the fate of Lehman Brothers is, of course, extremely important to its 25,000 employees. But on a global scale, the firm has a market value of only $5 billion. As the blog's author, Evan Newmark, points out, plenty of Russian millionaires are worth more than that on an individual basis.

Contrast this to Fannie and Freddie, who carry $5 trillion in mortgage debt. Quite frankly, when it comes to the US Treasury bailing out Lehman Brothers, there are bigger fish to fry. We're talking sardines vs. swordfish here.

To paraphrase the author's summary, I'm interested to see what happens with Lehman Brothers. In reality, how ever, it doesn't really matter.