There's a slightly postdiluvian feel about the world this week. Across the vast, soggy floodplain of global finance, small knots of financial refugees are emerging from their emergency shelters, sharing war stories, bucking each other up, perhaps even permitting themselves a smile or two as they look back with a shudder on the events of the past month.

The waters haven't receded completely, of course. But they have stopped rising. The mother of all lifeboats, the bank recapitalisation and debt guarantee measures, launched on a massive international scale last week, seem to have stopped the panic just in time — as it threatened to get completely out of control.

The credit markets remain in a highly unusual state of stress, but, at least as measured against the wild and terrifying movements in things such as Libor of the past few weeks, they are calmer. A deep and potentially long recession, the worst in at least a quarter of a century, seems inevitable. Yet the risk of something even worse, the much-heralded Son of the Great Depression, seems much smaller.

It is wise to wait until we know that the storm really has passed before we begin assessing what went wrong with the emergency response. Even if, God forbid, there might still be worse to come, we can surely at least begin making some tentative assessments about how we got here.

One question that is already much exercising policymakers and their critics is whether the crisis of the past few weeks was exacerbated by crucial policy mis-steps, or whether in some sense the rot in the financial system was already so extensive that, no matter what the authorities did, some sort of disaster on something like this scale was more or less inevitable.

This is not to get into the longer-term arguments about whether we have lived too long in a laissez-faire regulatory environment. People will have to decide whether more regulation is needed. My own view, as I've argued here before, is that the idea that there has been insufficient government involvement in finance these past 15 years or so is not really right. The regulation should and could have been smarter, better-focused and more co-ordinated, but that does not necessarily mean that there should have been a lot more of it.

The immediate question is rather whether the US authorities have screwed up in the past few weeks in a material way; that is, in a way that will make the long-term economic damage much worse than it would otherwise have been.

At least chronologically speaking the critical moment at which the crisis appeared to go from manageable mess to near-complete meltdown was the weekend of September 12-13. It seems about a year ago now but that was, you will recall, when the American authorities spent a lost weekend of financial triage, leaping between the disintegrating bodies of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG.

It has become almost axiomatic that the decision to let Lehman go was what led to the seizing-up of the credit markets that began in earnest over the following few days.

Certainly, it appears that investors suddenly had to revise their assumption that, à la Bear Stearns, the Government would step in and stop creditors from losing everything in an investment banking collapse. And it seems that the uncertainty created by the “Lehman can fail but AIG and Bear can't” message that weekend was followed by a general flight from any sort of risk.

As a senior financial official put it: “The Treasury was determined to show it had the guts to let Lehman fail. It should, instead, have been showing it had the guts not to let Lehman fail.”

US officials acknowledge that the chronology is right — that the near-collapse of the financial system occurred in the days following the Lehman failure — but they say it is simplistic to argue that the Lehman decision was somehow the catalyst for the bigger crisis that followed it. They point out that the credit markets were already deteriorating rapidly in the days leading up to that fateful weekend. That was, after all, why not only Lehman but Merrill and AIG were in the terminal stages of their own crises.

Of course, we will never really know what would have happened if a deal had been done to save Lehman that weekend. There must be something to the argument that, as with Bear six months earlier, another sticking-plaster approach to the crisis would merely have deferred, not resolved it.

Perhaps the bigger criticism is that it became clear to the authorities only after the Lehman collapse that a fully systemic solution was the only one that would work.

For that, the US authorities surely carry two burdens of responsibility. The first is the failure to recognise that need much earlier. Henry Paulson, the Treasury Secretary, was still insisting in July that he had a bazooka in his pocket that he would not have to use.

The second is the dithering that seemed to be necessary to get to the solution that, in fairness, many had been arguing for all along - the bank recapitalisation plan. From what I hear, Ben Bernanke and his Fed colleagues were sceptical all along about the Treasury idea of buying toxic assets from the banks and wanted recapitalisation from the start.

The Treasury's defence is twofold. Political conditions made it hard for it to propose what amounted to the nationalisation of the banking system, and talk about a government plan to buy equities in banks might have further undermined confidence (and the stock prices) of the nation's financial institutions.

One other point in its (muted) defence. At least it got to the right place in the end. That ought to mean that mistakes made were smaller than the catastrophic policy errors that led to the Great Depression.

At least, as far as we know.

gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk

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