Anglo Irish chairman Sean Fitzpatrick should place electrified fencing around the bank's St Stephen's Green headquarters so that executives run the risk of electric shock, ideally of the non-fatal sort, if they try to escape and attend international investor roadshows.

For the past two weeks the bank's top team have been jetting off to talk to institutional investors in far flung corners about the bank's future. Boy it must be a hard sell.

No dividends for the foreseeable future, virtually no share price growth, rising impairments/provisioning and drastically reduce lending activity. Maybe the executives should have stayed at home ? cranking up the air miles only seems to have cranked down the share price, which at one point touched 28 cent.

They might also usefully consider releasing less detailed earnings statements. The one put out two weeks ago was brimming with details about their loan book and its precise composition. But the move toward heavy detail seems to have produced scant reward for David Drumm and Co in terms of share price momentum.

The most startling thing about the Anglo Irish share price collapse (this seems the most appropriate word if you consider it was at €12 last year) is that the government did not feel compelled to step in and rescue the situation by Friday.

Having provided comfort to Anglo's bondholders and corporate depositors in late September, the government has appeared rather relaxed about the growing misery being visited upon the equity holders in the bank, once Ireland's third largest.

Anglo Irish is not quite a zombie at this point, at least if you hold to the classic definition of a zombie bank – an institution which has a market worth of less than zero and is only able to operate with government guarantees. But it might this week if the shares continue their perilous descent.

The obvious route out of its misery would have been for the bank to fold neatly into AIB, but there was no sign last Friday that such a deal appealed to Ireland's largest and arguably most durable bank. Anglo's decision a forthnight ago to squirrel away €500m to cover bad loans should in one sense be commended, but the amount was not very convincing.

Its assertion that its loan book will only need to take write-downs of about 1% a year for the next three years is even more unconvincing. Standard & Poors, this early in the cycle, is talking about problematic assets in Irish banks of between 5% and 15% of loans.

As we all know from the US sub-prime crisis and the view they took on various SIVs and CDOs etc, the rating agencies don't do exaggeration or over provisioning, preferring instead ultra caution before writing down the value of assets secured ultimately on property. When the credit rating agencies, and even Irish brokers, are forecasting higher impairments/provisions than Anglo itself, it makes the bank's prospects pretty grim. The government has up to now been sanguine – at least in public- about share price declines, saying it is not going to be swayed by routine daily price movements.

But of course daily price movements have an impact on its own room for manoeuvre.

Up to now it had three basic policy options available if Anglo got into trouble, nationalisation, capitalisation or bravely underwriting a rights issue. The first one is obviously available at either a knock-down price or no price at all, if they take the Bradford & Bingley/UK government route. The deposit business would probably find a buyer, but it is so integral to Anglo's lending, it is hard to see how they could be separated out.

The capitalisation option was being looked at last week, reports suggested, but many equity holders are still likely to run a mile from a state-controlled bank, especially one weighed down with liabilities caused by high yielding preference shares owned by the government/private equity.

There is a rights issue, but when your stock is trading at around 30 cent a share, a rights issue involving a discount of 45% (a la HBOS) becomes a farcical idea, both for the bank and for any underwriter stupid enough to get involved in such a capricious enterprise.

Either way, the government by Friday could no longer claim that daily share prices were not its concern.