Last year, as Lehman Brothers tottered, there was briefly hope that Barclays Bank would ride in with an 11th-hour bid. But the British government, fearful of contracting the American cancer, took fright and blocked it, helping to seal the investment bank’s fate. As American officials absorbed the news, an exhausted and exasperated Hank Paulson, the then treasury secretary, muttered that the British had “grin-f--cked us.”

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s fly-on-the-wall account of the great panic of 2008 is littered with such colourful anecdotes. It is meticulously researched, drawing on interviews with more than 200 of those who participated directly in the events it covers, including their handwritten notes and tape-recordings of critical meetings. The result is a compelling reconstruction of the drama surrounding the government seizure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman’s collapse, the rescue of American International Group (AIG), the subsequent market pandemonium and the shoring-up of big banks’ capital with public funds.

At the centre of the action stands Mr Paulson (when not kneeling to beg congressional leaders to support his bail-out), flanked by the fresh-faced but hard-nosed Tim Geithner, who in 2009 took over as treasury secretary, and the professorial, unflappable Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve. Though prone to dry-heaving when under pressure, and despite being horribly sleep-deprived, Mr Paulson acts decisively, if not always wisely, as he responds to what he calls “an economic 9/11”. The same cannot be said of Christopher Cox, then the dithering head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the investment banks’ main regulator, which Mr Paulson dismisses as “like the gang that can’t shoot straight.”

... contd.