After Bank of America took Merrill, for Lehman, the last remaining hope was a transatlantic deal with the British bank Barclays, where the expat American Bob Diamond, formerly of Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, was calling the shots. But Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Chancellor Alistair Darling refused to loosen regulations to allow the takeover to go ahead without full shareholder approval and without commitments of support from the US Treasury.
