That was clear when the Treasury Department decided to depart from its own initial bailout plan  the one approved by Congress earlier this month  and invest up to $250 billion directly in the nation’s banks. The nuts and bolts of that approach had been laid out days earlier by European leaders as they tried to save their own financial system.

And that outcome left Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, in something of a commanding position to claim the title of wise men. They are now speaking of creating a Bretton Woods agreement for the 21st century, while the leaders of the country that fathered the postwar financial system worked out at Bretton Woods, N.H., prefer to stay away from such big-picture talk.

Mr. Sarkozy, who was to meet this weekend with President Bush at Camp David, told European leaders who gathered in Paris recently that he hoped “literally to rebuild the foundations of the financial systems.”

C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, a centrist economic policy center, summed up the week this way: “When it came to crisis-response mode, the Europeans, especially the British, did take the lead and the U.S. changed course.”

And the markets seemed to respond accordingly. When stock exchanges around the world bounced back last week from the rout earlier in the month, European shares were big winners. They ended the week up 8.2 percent, compared with a 4.5 percent gain for Wall Street. Many Europeans can’t resist crowing. “European capitalism is better suited to meet the challenges of the current financial crisis,” Trouw, a Dutch newspaper, declared recently.