The only cure for the bank-run contagion is time, but the damage is already done

THE current banking crisis proves that – even after reforms brought on by the Great Depression and the global financial crisis – the financial system has few defences against periodic bouts of primal fear.

I covered the last financial crisis from a front-row seat. In 2008, I was working for Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal in New Jersey, punching out market reports with a panoramic view of New York’s gleaming skyscraper canyon of a financial district.

The day Lehman Brothers died, I heard my sources become untethered: old-school traders watching their touchstones, their culture, their whole world, blown to smithereens.