'Talk about asking for a miracle'

After a White House summit meeting that ground to a halt amid raised voices and finger pointing, Hank Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, got down on bended knee.

Looking up from the floor of the Roosevelt Room, he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and her fellow Democrats not to "blow it up" by withdrawing her party's support for his $700 billion financial bail-out package – or revealing quite how badly the summit had gone.

"I didn't know you were Catholic," Pelosi, an Italian-American ex convent girl, told the former Goldman Sachs chairman, who happens to be a Christian Scientist. "It's not me blowing this up, it's the Republicans."

Paulson sighed: "I know, I know." It had been an attempt to inject some gallows humour into a dire situation.

Moments earlier, George W. Bush had declared, with his characteristic penchant for boiling an issue down to its bare essentials: "If money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down." History may one day record whether the "sucker" he was referring to was the Bush-Paulson bail-out package or the United States itself.

It may read like a melodramatic Hollywood script but the future of the American remains at stake. The summit came after the most turbulent month in Wall Street since the Great Depression of the Thirties – a subject on which Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve and an architect of the Bush-Paulson plan, is an expert.

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