On May 29 2007, with the clock ticking on one of the greatest global property booms in history, Richard Fuld rolled the dice on the US real estate market one more time.

The odds were not good for the chairman and chief executive of Lehman Brothers investment bank. It had been nearly a year since the US Federal Reserve brought an end to the era of cheap money with a series of interest rate increases that took its overnight lending rate from 1 per cent in June 2003 to 5.25 per cent in June 2006. It had been more than three months since HSBC became the first big global bank to reveal multi-billion-dollar losses on subprime mortgage loans. The credit cycle was turning, as it had so many times before during Mr Fuld’s four decades at Lehman. But he still felt lucky.