The Islamist attacks on America stripped it of its time-honored Protestant ethic of financial caution.

At this writing, Wall Street is ablaze. What began a year ago with a crisis in a little-known corner of the housing market has since mushroomed into major mayhem. Last week this produced the bailouts of two major mortgage banks, and this week, in what looked like a metastasizing germ, it spread to the thick of the financial industry. There, it plagued venerable investment banks Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch and mega-insurer AIG, as hundreds of bankers, accountants and lawyers spent the weekend in their Manhattan skyscrapers, never turning off the lights.
Clearly, something larger than all of them combined is well under way, and it isn't pretty. In fact, what Wall Street is experiencing these days is but an extension of America's post-9/11 perplexity.
WHEN THEY arrived in the US as the Civil War approached, the Bavarian Jewish Lehman brothers had no reason to believe they would give rise to a major investment bank, or that one of them would give birth to a future New York governor and US senator. Even so, such speculation would have sounded less outlandish than the thought that their firm would some day generate history's worst bankruptcy and shock the world.
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