I am not, to put it mildly, an expert on the endgame leading to last year’s banking panic. For that we have authors Andrew Ross Sorkin, of The New York Times (Too Big to Fail); David Wessel, of The Wall Street Journal (In Fed We Trust); the beat reporters of the newspapers; several columnists; and blogger Yves Smith, who provides a stream of commentary. (For an insider’s view of the run-up to the crisis, there is Lawrence McDonald’s A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers.) But I like to think that, as a journalist, I know something about how public opinion is formed.

And for my money, the match that lit the fuse of the astonishing explosion in October was an article by Alan Sloan and Roddy Boyd three months earlier in Fortune. Sloan is, by common consent, the best financial journalist in the business. How Lehman Lost Its Way couldn’t have been timelier. It atoned for a puff piece the magazine had done a couple years before on Lehman CEO Richard Fuld.