The speed of Bear Stearns’ collapse and the types of funding that so quickly evaporated for the bank last week were aspects of the crisis that banks and regulators needed to “think about and digest”, said Gerald Corrigan, managing director at Goldman Sachs and former head of the New York Federal Reserve.

Mr Corrigan, a respected figure on Wall Street who has been central to efforts to understand financial market risks and construct ways to prevent financial crises, said: “It is quite clear that the current credit crisis has not yet run its course.”