Future generations (if schools still exist), might be taught about the historic meeting on September 25th, 2008, when President Bush was heard to utter “If money doesn’t loosen up, this sucker could go down.”

It was supposed to be not much more than a photo-opportunity, a demonstration of national unity in the face of economic crisis. There, for the first time in anyone’s memory, the incumbent President was meeting the two candidates battling to succeed him, together with the entire leadership of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The aim was to conclude the week-long deliberations over the plan announced by Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary, for a $700 billion bailout of the nation’s banks and to get legislation through Congress by the weekend.

When the photographers had been dismissed, President Bush spelt out what was at stake. According to senior advisers briefed on the detail of the meeting, he told the assembled leaders that it was not just the US financial system that was in peril. He made it clear that the entire architecture of the global economy was at stake.

John Boehner, the leader of the House Republicans, had been listening with evident irritation. Now he spoke up to denounce the Paulson plan. Mr Boehner and his party colleagues had been deluged all week with angry calls from constituents protesting at what they saw as a huge taxpayer giveaway to undeserving Wall Street bankers. He told the gathering that he and his colleagues could not support the plan and produced one of their own.

As the meeting seemed to be breaking up in disarray, the focus of administration turned to Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House Speaker. Numerically speaking, with a big Democratic majority, Mrs Pelosi already had enough votes to pass the plan. With a big majority assured in the Senate, why did she not just press ahead, she was asked? The whole deal could be done without the House Republicans.

But Mrs Pelosi would not take the political risk of passing a potentially unpopular measure with only Democratic support, leaving Republicans free to attack her and her colleagues in the campaign for congressional elections to be held in little over a month.

An agitated Mr Bush said, as the meeting finally unravelled: “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.”

I try to project being in that meeting, to feel the tension and hear those words from the President of the most powerful nation in the world, home to over 300 million human beings. After all that we have gone through, revolution, civil war, WWI, WWII, emancipation, absolution of slavery, ups, downs, and sideways, one man, sitting there in that crowded room, he says this “sucker” could go down.

I can’t help but wonder what kind of man could put it in those terms. It’s as if a single man, head of a single government with an out-of-control financial system that is primarily to fault of his administration, shrugs and says “oh well, it was fun while it lasted”. Good luck, and good night.