Quite how bad things were soon going to get was suggested three weeks later, when on September 14, Northern Rock, one of Britain’s largest mortgage lenders, failed. On TV screens, the Northern Rock panic looked like a classic bank run. Anxious depositors queued up outside beleaguered bank branches to retrieve their funds. News photographers and camera crews had a field day. But off camera something even worse was happening. The trillion-dollar global funding market was shutting down.
