It has become something of an article of faith that the biggest event of a year which has had its fair share of big events – the decision by the US Government to allow Lehman Brothers to go to the wall – was a massive policy mistake which turned a financial crisis into the meltdown of the past three months. But how much better or different might the world have been if Lehman had been rescued?

On this view, US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke grossly miscalculated the impact of letting Lehman Brothers go under, triggering a chain reaction that sent the financial markets into spasm, investors into panic and, with business starved of credit, the economy into cardiac arrest.