Yes, we all remember the tag-line. And, doubtless, also how we pitied Roy Scheider, playing the part of Amity’s hapless police chief and eventual saviour, whose loud protests that the water still wasn’t safe went unheard.

Sitting comfortably in our cinema seats and secure in the knowledge that the film had only been showing for 30 minutes, we all knew Scheider was right. Everyone else, of course, from shopowners, to tourist chiefs and even the town mayor, believed that the hunters who’d found and killed a small shark had ‘got’ the monster that had been terrorising local beaches.

They criticised the policeman for his paranoia - and returned to the beaches en masse. The rest is cinematic history.

OK, it’s a slightly flimsy analogy for what’s going on in the financial markets but consider this: after the $700 billion bail-out of Wall Street by Congress, the takeover of a host of banks by rivals, by governments and even by administrators, everyone is wondering if that is it. Or are there still more shocks to come?

Unlike Jaws, unfortunately, there is no script. And, worse, we don’t know whether this film is supposed to last just 30 minutes - or if it’s set to be a 3 hour blockbuster. The signs  aren’t encouraging. The face of banking has been transformed. Billions thrown at the markets. Ostensibly uncompetitive mergers waved through. The words ‘unprecedented’, ‘crisis’ and ‘meltdown’ appear in headlines everywhere, every day.

So what to think? Many would doubtless like to know that the entire bail-out represents some form of end-game, a ‘beginning of the end’ rather than just the end of the beginning.
Central banks can’t tell us. They’ve all been playing a reactive game ever since the sub-prime crisis began in the US last year. Admittedly, no one else predicted the extent of the events that have unfolded since either. And, sure, if they’d acted more quickly or in a joined up manner, some of the subsequent damage might have been avoided.

But hindsight is a wonderful thing - and persuading central banks and governments that they should have stumped up billions of pounds for a concerted bail out, or got regulatory authorities to arbitrarily brush competition law to one side in anticipation of a wave of emergency mergers, would have been impossible in anything resembling normal market conditions.

So, if we were auditioning for heroic roles right now, it might still be too early to say whether we’d be better off as the paranoid police chief or the complacent town mayor.