Professor Alan Ahearne:

A lot of work would have been done in the European committees in August and right through September as the global financial crisis was getting more and more intense. They must have been discussing this. I think they would have come to an informal agreement on how to handle the crisis and in particular not to have a Lehman Brothers in Europe. After the Lehman Brothers collapse and the chaos it spread, I am pretty sure there would have been a message at committee level, transmitted from there back to the capitals, there would be no Lehman Brothers in Europe, no disorderly bank failures.