What was the world's fourth largest investment bank before it collapsed yesterday, has now sought protection from its creditors after mucking everything all up.

In scenes similar to the crying and jumping part of the Great Depression in the 1920s, Lemming Brothers' employees threw themselves out of the lower doors of the building, in what would have been some of the worst investment banker rain storms in living memory had they done it from higher floors..

Lemming Brothers employed 25,000 people, some of whom were supposed to be risk experts but clearly didn't do much work for themselves.

Capitalists to the last, investment bank Lemon Brothers, who can trace their origins back to three German immigrant cotton traders in the 1840s, were the great American dream, now the great American bankruptcy.

But, whilst named Lemon, the bank, at which 25,000 souls worked on a daily or at least job sharily basis, has now failed, leaving others to wonder what else can be done to mop up what is now, if it were a house improvement television programme, be akin, on a monumental scale, to a cross between a bathroom flood in an upstairs apartment and that Colin and his partner's attempt to knock down a support wall in the apartment underneath, with all the dust and stuff that normally entails.

Lemon Brothers came to prominence in the United Kingdom as backing vocalists on the 1975 hit Kung Fu fighting. They won't be missed all that much. Huh! Yarh!

The tsunami of financial turbulence has wiped away another entire bank this morning, and it would have been two if the Bank of America had not 'bought' the other one. Bloody typical.

Lehming Brothers, once one of the largest investment banks in the world, is no longer so. It could even now be the smallest investment bank in the world for all they tell us - positively titchy and stuff, according to experts.

Lehming Brothers started as a cotton brokerage in the 1840s. They should have stuck to that and gone bankrupt years ago. Cotton bud anyone?