By wednesday, lomas and team were in a position to tell staff that a $100m loan would cover their salaries. now the focus could shift to trying to sell as much of the business as possible and trying to unwind its trading positions. Here, one of the biggest challenges for PwC and Lehman staff was learning to understand one another. "A bank measures its risk and asks, 'Are we hedged?'", says Pearson (that's to say, is the risk covered?). "Whereas we're interested in assets and liabilities. So the whole language had to be translated. We had to define our objectives and then have our industry guys translate that for the people in the front office."

For many Lehman traders, the need to unwind the company intelligently meant a new pay package with a hefty bonus component if they managed to strike deals that were advantageous to the Lehman estate. Pearson knows he might come in for outside criticism for doling out these bonuses, since all funds are now owed to the bank's thousands of creditors. But he defends the move. "It's exactly what I did at Enron, so I knew exactly how I wanted to handle this. You've got a bunch of people here who know these markets so well, and with the right piece of information they can make you - or lose you - hundreds of millions of dollars," he says. "The last thing you can afford to do in these circumstances is be cheap, because if you're cheap, you can ruin the ship for a hap'orth of tar."