On the evening of September 18, 2008, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke tells a stunned group of congressional leaders that the American financial system is days from collapse. This film reconstructs the week that followed, when Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail, AIG was bailed out for 85 billion dollars, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson scrambled to stop a run on money market funds. Interviews with Wall Street insiders, regulators, and journalists trace how mortgage-backed securities and credit-default swaps turned a housing slump into a systemic crisis, and how decisions made in a handful of emergency meetings determined which firms lived and which died. The film lays out the mechanics plainly: what commercial paper is, why banks stopped lending to each other, and why a money market fund breaking the buck mattered to ordinary savers. It closes with the 700 billion dollar bailout package moving through a Congress that barely understood the system it was being asked to save, and a financial industry left permanently changed by the week.