“It’s not over yet,” was Saturday’s stark comment on the future of the global financial crisis from Donald Kohn, vice-chairman of the US Federal Reserve. It is as neat a summing up as any of the past week’s wrangling over the turmoil among the world’s top economic decision-makers in Washington.

It was always going to prove hopelessly unrealistic to think that a brief weekend’s gathering of finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of Seven leading economies could yield a magical solution to a crisis of this magnitude, or even elements of one. There are, alas, no quick fixes: panaceas do not feature in the policymakers’ portfolios.

Certainly, by Friday the world’s equity markets seemed to have reverted to a grim mood of realism with the evaporation of a rose-tinted mini-rally in which investors had indulged themselves in a brief flirtation with irrational exuberance.

Yet if Mr Kohn was referring to the prospect for a swift resolution to the crisis, he might just as well have been talking about the response to its causes and consequences from ministers, central banks and regulators. That, too, is very far from over.

The leaders of the world’s biggest banking groups, whose institutions are chief among the culprits for the present financial calamities, seem to have flown into Washington in the hope that policymakers could be persuaded that the initial raft of official measures considered over the weekend might mark if not the end of the regulatory reaction, then at least the beginning of the end.

The case the bankers hoped to plead was that they should be left to put their own houses in order through voluntary action and self-policing.

They were given the chance to make that case, and their penitence, as the ministers and governors served them some generous portions of humble pie at the G7’s so-called “outreach dinner” on Friday night. They clearly failed, as they were doomed to.

If the big banks and their bosses were in any doubt before this weekend, it ought now to be apparent to them that they have brought upon themselves what looks certain to be a long and radical reshaping of the regulatory landscape, with the most sweeping overhaul of the rules governing financial markets and institutions for decades.

The precise scale of the response may vary between the big developed economies. Much of the reaction may be deferred until the worst of the immediate financial and economic turbulence has done its damage. But it should now be plain to the banks that, having sown the wind, they will now inescapably reap the whirlwind.

It has now made plain that the 74-page battery of reform proposals mapped out by the leading economies’ Financial Stability Forum (FSF), and endorsed as an edict by the G7 in its entirety on Friday, does not even mark the end of the beginning of the official riposte that the banks will now confront.

So much was spelt out yesterday with brutal clarity by the top financial officials who sit on the FSF: change is to be concrete rather than cosmetic.

The banks have not given up on their defence yet, having offered a highly public show of contrition in Frankfurt last week when Josef Ackermann, the Deutsche Bank chief executive, who chairs the banks’ lobby group, the Institute of International Finance (IIF), sounded a warning that it would be “completely wrong to jump to some premature regulatory measures”.

As the International Monetary Fund itself argued, he has a point. The damaging consequences of regulating in haste have been made painfully obvious by the Sarbanes-Oxley episode in the United States.

Dr Ackermann’s problem is that for many it is not the IIF’s mea culpas that stand out as an embodiment of the banks’ recent attitudes but the less calculated comments of Charles “Chuck” Prince, the ousted chief executive of Citigroup.

His view was: “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”

As it turned out, Mr Prince was dancing at the End of the World Ball. His remark should be etched into bankers’ consciousness as a reminder of the bigger task that they face now. More than repairing the damage they have done, they must repair the trust that they have sacrificed. It will be a big job.

Beyond the raft of technocratic measures proposed by the G7, though, there is a need, too, for a more philosophical and ethical component of rebuilding public trust to be placed at the centre of the official response to this crisis.

Three years ago here, I highlighted the case put by Avinash Persaud for financial markets to be invested with a more powerful moral dimension. He argued then that in the financial world there should be “no place to hide” from ethical responsibilities.

Without a clearly delineated framework of ethics within which participants can examine their own actions, Professor Persaud argued that a negative dynamic can take root in financial markets and institutions, which can both foment and reward malfeasance.

“Without some self-questioning, there is a slippery slope of ethical behaviour where bad practices become the norm, which creates a competitive cost to acting ethically,” he wrote.

Those words look all the more prescient today and make a compelling case for a greater ethical imperative to be put at the heart of the rethink of the global financial regime that is now under way.

To some, this will seem an odd concept. There is a common belief that money and morality make strange bedfellows. Yet recent events have surely made all too clear that while a few can make a quick buck, even millions of them, from shoddy practices, the long-term economic costs to the wider community can be vast.

As Professor Persaud argued: “Markets known for strong ethics will be more successful than those in which traders hang up their morals at the door.”

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