A year ago today, an investment bank failed, and the world looked into the abyss.

Today, President Barack Obama used the anniversary of Lehman Brothers' failure to deliver a message at Freedom Hall in New York that the system that led to that collapse has to change. He pitched his plans to reform the banking system, reform he calls the most sweeping since the Great Depression, and reform he says is necessary to avert another disaster like the one that unfolded last fall.

"Those on Wall Street cannot resume taking risks without regard for consequences and expect that next time American taxpayers will be there to break their fall," Obama said, according to a transcript. His remarks coincided with widespread frustration that the opportunity for reform was slipping away and pressure to put a financial overhaul back on track. On Monday, a court issued a stinging rebuke to the Securities and Exchange Commission by rejecting its proposed settlement with Bank of America.

Last year, top officials in the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve decided they wouldn’t—or couldn’t—save Lehman Brothers. And when the investment bank failed, the full extent of the credit mess that had been building for a year became crystal clear. Credit markets worldwide froze solid.

Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has said the world came to the edge of a crisis as deep as the Great Depression the day that Lehman failed and in the following weeks. And if it hadn’t been for extraordinary steps by governments worldwide to pump money into the system and get credit flowing again, he might have been proved right.

"We could not separate what was happening in the corridors of our financial institutions from what was happening on factory floors and around kitchen tables," Obama said. "Home foreclosures linked those who took out home loans and those who repackaged those loans as securities. A lack of access to affordable credit threatened the health of large firms and small businesses, as well as those whose jobs depended on them. And a weakened financial system weakened the broader economy, which in turn further weakened the financial system."

Within weeks, the U.S. government was coming to the rescue of insurance giant AIG, ultimately pumping $85 billion into that institution. The administration was calling on Congress for an emergency $800 billion that would ultimately be directly injected into some of the nation’s banks and car companies—money that is being used to stabilize many of those banks to this day. The Treasury rushed in to back money market funds and save them from what the Wall Street Journal calls a 19th-century-style bank run. The Fed bypassed banks to loan money directly to industrial companies pressured by the loss of traditional credit. In addition to pumping money into the banks, the government guaranteed bank borrowing to forestall a systemwide contraction.

All of those measures, Obama said in a speech that was part sigh of relief and part lecture on needed reforms, have started to work.

"While full recovery of the financial system will take a great deal more time and work, the growing stability resulting from these interventions means we are beginning to return to normalcy," he said. "But what I want to emphasize is this: Normalcy cannot lead to complacency."

As it is, the world appears to be slowly coming out of recession, though unemployment remains painfully high and there is still plenty of danger of failing banks. More than 90 have failed in the U.S. so far this year.

The government is, as a result of the crisis, more deeply entwined in the economy than it has been since World War II, the New York Times reports. Nine out of 10 new mortgages are financed by the government. The government owns 80 percent of AIG and 60 percent of General Motors. And, as the Times says, if you run up credit-card debt, chances are the government is financing your debt and your bank’s debt as well.

All of that leaves the government with the significant challenge of how to remove itself from such a deep role in the economy without tilting it back into recession. And it’s had some success so far, at least in the financial arena. Three dozen financial institutions have repaid $70 billion in loans to the Treasury.

And the program the FDIC put in place to guarantee bank debt, the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, could be drawing to a close in October as private capital comes back into the banking system. New guarantees declined to $5 billion in August, compared to $90 billion in July. So far, the program could be considered a success. It hasn’t faced any guarantee payouts despite having $304.14 billion in FDIC-backed debt issued, and the agency has collected $9.3 billion in fees from banks that have participated.