The end of Lehmans was swift but the bank had actually been throwing people overboard for some time in a desperate but failed attempt to stop itself sinking.
In October 2008, officials at the US Treasury and the New York Federal Reserve also thought that the private sector was prepared for Lehmans to go bust (after all, they'd had six months to think about it, since the authorities managed the collapse of Bear Stearns).
In some ways, as frustrating as the financial sector has been here in the United States after the Lehmans collapse, the aggressive actions that were taken right after Lehmans did help us to strengthen the financial sector and the banking sector in ways that Europe did not fully go through.