Moral Hazard and Panic.

Last, thousands of anxious Britons spent days queuing in front of bank branches to withdraw their savings from Northern Rock, a British mortgage lender caught up in a credit crunch. Many emptied their accounts, even after British Chancellor Alistair Darling announced the government would guarantee existing savings accounts in an attempt to stop the panic. [...]

On the other hand, as Sidney Weintraub, an economic scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me, it is "not unreasonable to blame" the United States for the British bank's woes. "They're part of the global market, and they got themselves involved. That's the way the world works."

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