The nationalisation and break up of Bradford & Bingley will represent a momentous event in the history of British banking, because it will mean that every building society that floated on the stock market in the wave of demutualisations of the past two decades will either have collapsed or been sold to a conventional bank.
It may well be seen as proving that demutualisation of building societies has been a colossal mistake, both for the institutions themselves and for the British economy (I will return to this theme in the coming days).