Unhappy Anniversary: It may seem like 10 years ago, but it was only last Sept 25 that President George W. Bush summoned presidential candidates John McCain, left, and Barack Obama, right, along with Congressional leaders, to discuss the financial meltdown. (AFP Photo)

One year ago, on the weekend of Sept. 13-14, 2008, financial regulators and Wall Street tycoons were in round-the-clock meetings at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York City, trying to keep the American economy from collapsing.

What came out of those extraordinary meetings was a decision to let the Lehman Brothers investment bank fail; a decision that Bank of America, with underwriting from the federal treasury, would take over a second investment bank, Merrill Lynch; and a decision that the government would loan $85 billion to American International Group to keep the mammoth financial insurance company from collapsing.

As the news exploded over the next few days, Wall Street was on the verge of panic. Many Americans began learning a new vocabulary: phrases like “toxic assets,” “collateralized debt obligations,” “credit default swaps,” “LIBOR” and “quants.” Credit markets began to dry up, especially in the commercial paper market on which Main Street businesses rely.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who as head of the New York Fed, participated in the emergency meetings of September 2008, recalled on CNBC last Thursday night that, “We were at the edge of the abyss. For the first time in really a century, we were at the edge of a classic run on the financial system. The rivets were close to coming off the submarine.”

On Friday, Sept. 19, the sub’s commander, President George W. Bush, asked Congress for authorization to invest billions — the number would reach $700 billion — to buy “toxic assets” from lenders with the intent of freeing up credit. In that one week, the world changed — a conservative Republican president was proposing massive government intervention in capital markets.

Eventually Congress went along (though it took a 777-point one-day drop in the stock market to convince the House), and so did other major industrial nations. But the economy continued to crater throughout autumn, forcing more intervention by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. After his inauguration in January, the new president, Barack Obama, signed a $787 billion stimulus plan and all but took over the American automobile industry.

World financial collapse and a second Great Depression were averted. Slowly, imperceptibly to many Americans, the economy has begun to recover. On this first anniversary of the Ides of September crisis, it’s worth considering how well we’ve learned our lessons and what work remains to be done.

“Thanks to the bold and decisive action we have taken since January,” Mr. Obama told Congress Wednesday evening, “I can stand here with confidence and say that we have pulled this economy back from the brink.”

Well, yes and no. Some parts of the economy stand farther from the brink than others. The stock market dropped 4,392 points between Sept. 2 and Nov. 21 last year. It has recovered about half of that loss, with the Dow Jones industrial average closing at 9,605 on Friday.

The banking industry, too, has bounced back. Most of the biggest banks, even those that received tens of billions in government bailouts, reported healthy second-quarter profits. Bank executives now want to be relieved of government-imposed limits on their bonuses. A man like Andrew J. Hall, a Citigroup trader who is owed a $100 million bonus largely for speculating in the oil market, is pretty far back from the economic brink.

Now the big banks, having nicely recovered from the economic crisis that their greed-centered mismanagement caused, furiously are lobbying Congress to avoid stricter oversight. Mr. Obama has proposed broad new regulations of the financial system, but the industry is spending lavishly to make sure it can continue doing business as usual.

Next year is an election year. The mind reels at the money that banks will spend to make sure that regulations are watered down. They’ve already begun; in April, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., lamented that banks “are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”

Meanwhile, the banks — having been rescued from their bad bets on securitized mortgages — are moving very slowly to modify the original mortgages that they inflated, repackaged and overleveraged to create all those ephemeral profits. The Treasury Department’s $75 billion mortgage-modification program has been tapped to help only 360,000 of the 3 million homeowners who qualify for help.

A public interest group called the Center for Responsible Lending says that as many as 13 million Americans will face foreclosure in the next five years. The incipient economic recovery of which Mr. Obama boasts will not be complete unless and until he jawbones lenders into helping responsible American homeowners keep their homes.

Complicating that, of course, will be the persistent problem of unemployment. To the extent that we’re on the verge of a recovery, it is a jobless recovery. National unemployment was 9.6 percent in August; in Michigan it’s 15 percent.

The $787 billion economic stimulus package Mr. Obama signed in February should have done a lot more to alleviate that. Instead, Congress treated it largely as a pork package, parceling much of it out to projects that are in planning stages. The jobless rate is expected to drop later this year and throughout next year as the stimulus money begins to kick in, but that doesn’t do much now to pull a jobless worker with an underwater mortgage back from the brink.

One year after the fall, that unemployed American could be skeptical about his government’s response to the crisis. Many of the people who created the crisis — the Wall Street executives and high rollers — are thriving and looking forward to six- and seven-figure year-end bonuses.

Most of nation’s wealthiest people are not as wealthy as they were a year ago, but the wolf is not at their door. Elsewhere, the Census Bureau reported last week, the economic crisis has helped wipe out 10 years of economic gain. Real household income is now below what it was in 1999. The average Missouri household now has 3.6 percent less to spend than it did 10 years ago. In Illinois, the figure is 2.3 percent.

On the other hand, there’s now the greatest consensus since the New Deal that government has a duty to manage the most egregious failures of the capital markets. The challenge remains for government to do it right.