The recent global financial crisis represents a major economic challenge. In order to prevent such market failure, it is vital to understand what caused the crisis and what are the lessons to be learned. Given the tremendous bailout packages worldwide, we discuss the role of governments as lenders of last resort. In our view, it is important not to suspend the market mechanism of bankruptcy via granting rescue packages. Only those institutions which are illiquid but solvent should be rescued, and this should occur at a significant cost for the respective institution. We provide a formal illustration of a rescue mechanism, which allows to distinguish between illiquid but solvent and insolvent banks. Furthermore, we argue that stricter regulation cannot be the sole consequence of the crisis. There appears to be a need for improved risk awareness, more sophisticated risk management and an alignment of interest among the participants in the market for credit risk.