PARIS, September 19, 2007 (LPAC)--"These are historic times," says Martin Wolf in an oped in today's Financial Times, amidst general debate in that paper as to whether the Bank of England should not have been more liberal in its refinancing of mortgage-backed debt, supposedly to avoid such bankruptcies. "Financial panic has hit both the public and the politicians of the U.K. over the past week, to deliver two remarkable results," says Wolf - "the first run on a British bank since the collapse of Overend and Gurney in 1866; and the transformation of bank deposits into public debt at the stroke of a pen." Wolf claims it was necessary for the Bank of England to guarantee the deposits of Northern Rock, citing the danger of "contagion" as a main reason. "On Monday [Sept. 17], the shares of institutions dedicated to lending for house purchases collapsed. Northern Rock may not have been a systemically important institution. But its implosion became a systemically important event." The conclusion however is worse insanity, i.e. that in the future, "normal insolvency procedures should not apply to banks."