When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Conditions in the world's financial markets could be tougher, but not much. And the world's top central banks, led by the US Federal Reserve, have certainly not been idle in taking action to quell the intense strains that erupted in money markets for lending between commercial banks.

Today's $180 billion (£100 billion) coordinated emergency operation by the Fed, the Bank of England, European Central Bank and others sounds impressive, not to say daunting in its scale. It is meant to.

With the Fed temporarily lending this vast sum in dollars to its European and Asian counterparts through a swap arrangement, the central banks hope to contain the severe stresses sparked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which have unleashed a panicky scramble for dollars across the money markets.

But this is, in essence, an exercise in damage limitation as the central banks fight the financial fires that Lehman's failure has ignited on Wall Street and throughout the markets.

Arguably, it might have been prescient of the authorities — here, as well as in the United States — to have moved more swiftly to put in place these measures to soothe the markets.

Once again, they have been driven to react to events, in this case the money market upheavals since Monday, rather than managing and controlling this crisis pre-emptively.

The apparently vast dollar sum involved needs to be kept in perspective too.

Yes, this is a big operation. But these are funds that will be only temporarily injected into the market for dollar lending between banks in the UK, Europe and Japan for periods of as little as 24 hours, and probably not longer than three to five days.

Today's operation should not be confused in its magnitude with actions such as the US Government's $85 billion bailout loan to AIG, the floundering insurer, or the even larger rescues of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the secondary mortgage lenders: that is real money from the taxpayer that could, like Lehman, vanish overnight in the present maelstrom.

Today's measures are welcome and ought to help to tame the short-term funding and liquidity pressures besetting financial institutions and the markets.

But no-one should be deluded into thinking they will do much to prevent still more seismic upheavals as banks struggle to shore up their finances in the face of the huge losses inflicted by the US housing slump and the sub-prime debacle.

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