Lehman is a wake up call that America can't be trusted.

As important at it seems right now on Wall Street, this isn't a day that most Americans will remember as all that big of a deal.

When Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. goes out of business, the reaction of the average citizen is either ``Lehman who?'' or, ``I heard of them! What do they do?''

It is a big deal, however, but not because some bond traders are out of work, or that puff pieces in business sections about Dick Fuld's survival skills turned out to be wrong. It's a big deal because this is the day that American financiers, from the point of view of the Asians who sit on top of the world's biggest pile of mobile capital, became a bad risk.

Not so bad as the Sudanese, perhaps, but certainly worse than the Chileans. According to the bankruptcy papers thrown together over the weekend, the list of Lehman's 30 biggest unsecured creditors is dominated by Asian financial institutions: Aozora, Chuo Mitsui Trust, Sumitomo-Mistubishi Banking Corp., Mizuho Corporate Bank, Shinkin Central Bank, Bank of China and so on.

Who else did you imagine would be left holding this bag? Who else did you imagine was propping up the system?

Ever since the government jumped in to bail out Bear Stearns Cos.—and whatever else that was, it was a bailout—the behavior of the U.S. government in the financial markets has felt like a mystery by an author who is cheating and withholding a key piece of information.