The wholesale help from New Zealand's government for the failed carcass of South Canterbury Finance will, all must hope, prove some sort of end point to a wholly home-grown financial crisis.Long before most of the world stumbled into the credit crunch in 2007 New Zealand's investor and financial intermediaries were starting to crumble.National Finance 2000 closed its doors in May 2006. Provincial Finance followed suit in June and Western Bay Finance in August.The loss of these minnows in mid 2006 soon gave way to a flow of news of strife in finance company land.Bridgecorp, which lasted another year, and Hanover, which survived, became topical later in the year.More failures followed, including St Laurence and Strategic Finance.The "deep freeze" list maintained by Interest.co.nz records 61 finance company failures since 2006. These firms owe 240,000 investors NZ$8.5 billion.South Canterbury was always vulnerable, and like all the rest failed ultimately through its own mismanagement.Reserve Bank of New Zealand data shows that household investment in non-bank deposit takers increased by a factor of four between the mid1990s and the mid 2000s, with more than NZ$11 billion invested when trouble hit in 2006. Current investments are around NZ$8 billion, a figure supported over the last two years by the government guarantee.