Congratulations. You are reading an article that, like Fannie Mae, is now too big to fail. The systemic risk to the newspaper’s entire intellectual framework means this notebook cannot be allowed to go down. Oh, I know it may look like nothing much, buried away at the foot of the page. I know what you are thinking: if anyone is too big to fail it is Gapper over there on the right, swanking around with 900 words and a huge illustration.

But that is to misunderstand the complex journalistic architecture that goes into producing these pages. A Gapper failure – considered no more than a one in 3m possibility – would certainly disrupt the facing page, but swift action by production regulators would almost certainly be able to avert a crisis. By contrast, the collapse of this notebook carries a systemic risk – it is the monoline of comment.