In the week Lehman collapsed, the Bush administration propped up insurance giant AIG. As the days passed, European banks came under pressure. Dutch Belgian finance group Fortis was on the brink. The Icelandic banking system crashed and, barely a fortnight after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Treasury civil servants were burning the midnight oil again to save Bradford & Bingley, Britain's leading buy-to-let lender. The nationalisation of B&B was announced on Monday 29 October, the first day of the Conservative party conference in Birmingham. That evening, the speech by shadow chancellor George Osborne was overshadowed when Congress rejected Paulson's $750bn plan to buy up toxic assets from the US banks. Predictably, shares on Wall Street collapsed.