Unlike the puppy, the banks were rescued, not for their sakes, but for all our sakes. Or so we are told. Not everyone agrees, and even more simply do not understand. Still, on an international level, the chaos which followed the failure of Lehman Bros does suggest that simply letting market forces take their course would have been catastrophic.

The big global banks, though, are not so much a helpless puppy as a very large rottweiler, and one which seems not to have been house- trained.

Now that they have recovered from their initial ordeal, they are running around the place, chewing up the furniture and fouling the garden. Or, in this case, getting nasty with struggling customers, playing dangerous games in the financial markets and paying themselves huge bonuses -- an expected Pounds 6bn in the case of the UK.

The situation is different in Ireland, where the banking system consists essentially of two large retail banks. But the questions are essentially the same -- what to do with the banks' present condition, and how to make them behave better in the future?

It is an odd business. When Northern Rock went down, it was the first collapse of a British retail bank since Overend Gurney in the middle of the 19th century. The governor of the Swedish Riksbank, in Dublin last week, recalled that when they looked for precedents in the crisis of the 1990s they found that the last Swedish failure had been 1905. Yet now, the banking system is seen as a potential weapon of mass financial destruction.

They have a much more troubled history in the USA. Could this be because it was such a rapidly-growing economy, driven by waves of new workers and capital hungry for the rewards that can come with risk? A paradigm, in other words, for today's integrating global economy? It is interesting that the US had particularly strict banking laws. Americans had learnt something from repeated bank failures.

There were limits on banking across state lines -- something which Brussels might like to ponder. Banks could not combine commercial and investment banking -- what are now being called 'utilities' and 'casinos'.

These laws were only repealed in the 1970s and 1980s. There is a widespread view that their repeal contributed in part to the crisis. But there is also a general feeling internationally that merely re- imposing similar restrictions will not be enough to make banking safe -- or at least prevent it being a major threat.

This, too, is odd.