Comment: If Lehman had been saved, would Jacko have lived?

There's anger, too, in some quarters, that Chancellor Alistair Darling did not do enough to encourage Lehman's sale to Barclays by guaranteeing its toxic debt and, more pertinently, that Hank Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, did not step in to save one of America's own, choosing instead, at the final asking, to condemn the company and its 25,000 employees.

If Hank's pollice verso had not been so brutal they would have kept their jobs, the banking system would have carried on regardless, the credit crunch would have been a fantasy, the recession would not have got going, Obama would not be in the White House... oh, and submits the historian Niall Ferguson, tongue-in-cheek, Michael Jackson would still be with us (Jacko's finances would not have tanked in the subsequent crash, he would not have signed up to 50 dates at the O2 and put himself under huge stress).

That Paulson, he's got a lot to answer for. But has he? The unpalatable truth is that something had to happen, something had to give.

If Lehman had been saved, further problems would have been stored up that at some point would have come crashing down - probably with even more severe consequences.

Lehman's collapse was an almighty wake-up call that focused minds like no other event in financial history.

Prior to then, we'd seen a trickle of failures and government interventions - in Northern Rock here, and Bear Stearns and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the US. All to no avail. There was clearly a rotten core that needed excising once and for all.

Instead of dealing with individual crises as they arose, regulators realised they had to come up with a collective solution.

In the UK, the bosses of banks that were weak were made to sit down the corridor in the Treasury from the Chancellor and told what they were going to do. In Washington, not New York, the Tarp, or troubled asset relief programme, was instigated.

If Hank had raised his thumbs he would have been asked to decide the fate of Citigroup (far bigger and, unlike Lehman, a bank that touched every Main Street). Darling would be faced with the prospect of Barclays struggling to absorbb the whole of Lehman, to go with Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS. The credit crunch was already underway and the slump would not have been avoided.

As for Jackson, surely, the pressures were building well before 15 September last year.