This has been a week of astonishing brinkmanship - one that, I cannot help thinking, has shown what giants the guardians of America's financial system are compared with the pygmies running Britain.

On Friday the rumours that an American bank was about to collapse sowed panic in stock markets that had hitherto seemed almost immune to the credit crunch. The dollar went into freefall. By Tuesday the gunslingers of the US Federal Reserve had engineered a takeover of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan, with the help of a $30 billion subsidy. In doing so, the Fed ripped up the rulebook of central banking. America has not offered emergency funds to brokers, as opposed to banks, since the Great Depression.

Why should the taxpayer bail out banks that have no depositors? Aren't these the same idiots who convinced Americans in trailer parks to buy houses they couldn't afford? Who packaged up dodgy loans into elegant parcels and passed them around the world? Yes. Abetted by complacent rating agencies, who stuck triple-A quality labels on junk, banks such as Bear Stearns have created a new kind of financial crisis, because there were so many players playing pass-the-parcel, and because no one knows where all the parcels ended up. They now sit like unexploded bombs on the balance sheet of almost every financial institution.

But that is precisely why Bear Stearns had to be saved. The company was a financial intermediary at the heart of many complicated global transactions. Had it collapsed, no one knew how many more dominoes would have fallen. The Fed's bold bailout avoided the much bigger bailout that a collapse would have necessitated, because so many of the counterparties to Bear Stearns' agreements were banks that do have depositors.

Bankers may live in a different world to most of us, but our fortunes are horribly aligned. Old-fashioned banks were not built with marble halls for nothing. They were meant to exude solidity, because to doubt a bank's creditworthiness is to undermine every commercial transaction. If lenders stop lending, economies stall. The living standards of millions of people hang in the balance.

The creativity and resolution shown by the Fed and the US Treasury sit in stark contrast to Britain. The US authorities took four days to rescue Bear Stearns. The Bank of England and the Treasury dithered for six months over Northern Rock, which could have been rescued by Lloyds TSB in August for less.

I am told that last weekend Fed officials rang leading banks all over the world to tell them to keep trading with Lehman Brothers, also rumoured to be in trouble. Lehmans survived. Meanwhile, the Governor of the Bank of England cancelled a trip to the West Midlands. Oh. His officials last week arranged a meeting with “leading banks” - which is scheduled for next week.

This lack of interest is making British financiers deeply nervous. Yesterday the City wavered after completely unfounded rumours that HBOS was on the brink. “These rumours can only be propagated,” one senior banker told me, “because people don't believe the Bank of England cares whether anyone goes down.”

That is an astonishing comment from a very senior executive, about a central bank whose job is to shore up confidence. In nine years out of ten, central banks are expected to be invisible. In a crisis, they need to calm the waters. A central bank that is not trusted is worthless.

By rescuing Bear Stearns, the US Fed has put out a clear message that it will not let a big firm go down. It has backed up that message by offering emergency loans in exchange for a broad range of collateral. The Bank of England is still offering emergency funding on much narrower terms. So UK banks face significantly higher costs of borrowing than their American and continental competitors. This is dangerous, because Britain is particularly vulnerable to a liquidity crunch. Our banks currently hold about £550 billion more loans than deposits. Fears about imbalances lead to companies such as Scottish Widows withdrawing mortgage offers at ten minutes' notice. That spooks consumers.

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, has articulated perfectly valid concerns about moral hazard: that more bubbles will be created unless financiers learn the lessons of their folly. Ben Bernanke, the Fed Chairman who wrote his PhD on the 1929 Crash, clearly feels those concerns must be put on hold while the world is on the brink of recession. He is right. The brief reprieve achieved in America this week is by no means the end of the crisis. This is the wrong time for the regulators who failed to regulate to sit back and say: “I told you so.”

There is no sign that the British Government will act more swiftly if another British bank gets into trouble. There is no sign of any plan to change the tripartite system, designed by Gordon Brown, that has failed so spectacularly to handle the situation. Hank Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary, is an ex-Goldman Sachs banker who calls top executives every day. Alistair Darling is a lawyer whose singular achievement in last week's Budget was to tax rich non-domiciled residents just when London needs them most. Non-doms tell me that what irks them even more than the cost is the uncertainty Mr Darling has created over their future.

Uncertainty is lethal. Confidence is priceless. That is a point that our rulers seem unable to grasp. God save America. And God help Britain.

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