As Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, said, banks are “global in life, but national in death”. They make profits around the world, and can be load-bearing beams in the world’s financial system. But, if an institution cracks, it is the bank’s home finance ministry that must pay the bill for saving it. EU ministers, this week, have been arguing about who, in the case of cross-border European banks, should be sent the invoice.

Regulators have a duty to make sure that banks are both stable and adequately capitalised. Even if sickly institutions do not collapse, as Lehman Brothers did, the world economy cannot afford to have many banks earning their way out of insolvency by cutting back their streams of lending. That strategy, if widely followed, would be a recipe for a credit crisis.