Exactly 15 years after "Black Wednesday" - September16, 1992, when Britain's then Conservative government lost voters' trust on the economy, Prime Minister Gordon Brown must be hoping his Labour Party is not about to do the same.
Panicked savers have been queuing in droves around the country to withdraw their money from Northern Rock, Britain's fifth-biggest mortgage lender, after the cash-strapped bank had to get an emergency funding line from the Bank of England.
Regulators say Northern Rock is solvent, but has fallen foul of a credit crunch in global financial markets as banks, unsure which, if any, among them is over-exposed to defaulting US mortgages, have become reluctant to lend to each other.
But fears are growing of an old-fashioned bank run when tills reopen on Friday, after estimates that 1.5 billion pounds ($3.03 billion), or 6 percent of Northern Rock's deposits, had already been taken out over Friday and Saturday.
Policymakers are worried. Finance Minister Alistair Darling returned from a European Union meeting in Portugal to hit the television airwaves appealing for calm: "Because we have a fundamentally strong economy, because our banking system is much stronger than it ever was in the past. There have been shocks in the past, there will be difficulties in the future, but we can deal with those."
Brown, Prime Minister since June after running the Treasury for a decade in which the economy has grown continuously, must be wondering whether this week's events will mark a watershed. Confidence, when it goes, is hard to win back.
Back on "Black Wednesday" - September 16, 1992 - John Major's Conservative government spent billions of pounds and jacked up interest rates 5 percentage points in the space of a few hours in a bid to keep the pound in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). Its failure and ejection that day from the ERM cost the government its reputation for sound economic management.
Even if Northern Rock survives - experts say it is most likely to be bought by a bigger bank - lending practices that have allowed house prices to triple in a decade are likely to change and pose a serious threat to the property market.
Some mortgage lenders have in recent years been offering customers loans of up to 125 percent of a property's value and of as much as six times their annual salary.
Plentiful credit has helped prop up house prices further and also fuel a huge buy-to-let market as many Britons have bet on bricks and mortar as the surest way to riches.
Personal debt has consequently risen fast. The outstanding amount has risen by a third in three years to about 1.3 trillion pounds, roughly the total annual economic output of the nation.
Policymakers like Bank of England Governor Mervyn King have long warned that both borrowers and lenders need to be careful, but his calls have for the most part fallen on deaf ears.