On the morning of Saturday September 13 2008, Merrill Lynch chief executive John Thain slipped away from his Wall Street counterparts to start negotiating a shotgun marriage with Bank of America after the penny dropped that Lehman Brothers was going down, and Merrill Lynch would follow soon after. Then would have come Morgan Stanley, followed by Goldman Sachs.

As US and European banks lined up like dominoes at the peak of the financial crisis, they at least had the option of selling themselves into the safety blanket of a larger parent. That option is not, unfortunately, open to struggling sovereign nations.