Will it be slippery nipples all round? Harvey Wallbangers, maybe, or possibly even a nice Banker’s Lunch (vodka, vermouth, orange liqueur and grapefruit juice). Whatever is on the drinks menu, next month’s 10-year reunion of former Lehman Brothers employees should be quite a night.

On 15 September 2008, in the memorable image from the film The Big Short, the fatal Jenga brick of destiny slipped out of place and the whole global financial tower teetered on the edge of collapse. Lehman Brothers was finished, and the rest of us very nearly were too.

In the following weeks, the Royal Bank of Scotland had to admit the game was up. We were hours away from the cash machines being switched off. As the former president George W Bush so eloquently put it during the crisis, without radical action “this sucker’s going down”.

Buy-backs starve firms of useful investment. If you want to know why productivity and pay remain so low, look here

Little cause for celebration, then, to mark this 10-year anniversary. The intervening years have not been great ones for the majority of workers. Wages have been flat, while bailed-out bankers have gone back to work and not, usually, to prison. The cost of the bailouts has been borne by ordinary people. The politics of austerity, which have seen benefits cuts and the slashing of local services, have dominated.

First during the EU referendum, and to some extent during last year’s general election, voters finally made their dissatisfaction with the status quo known. Nobody will be throwing a party to celebrate 10 years of growth in the use of food banks or the crumbling of social care.

But perhaps we should temper our outrage for just a moment. It wasn’t Lehman Brothers employees in London who brought the bank down. It wasn’t nice to have to box up possessions and walk out on to the streets in front of the TV cameras, with your uncertain future forming an iconic image for that evening’s news bulletins.

The Labour party’s old clause IV used to speak respectfully of “the workers by hand or by brain”. So while an almighty booze-up of rich bankers celebrating their notoriety would indeed be “sickening”, as John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, put it, a work reunion of former colleagues is not necessarily something to begrudge anyone.

The more serious question is whether we can afford to be relaxed about the financial system 10 years on. Is it too soon to breathe out and have a party? On the face of it, we could feel more confident about the stability of the system. Capital adequacy requirements have been tightened, risk management has had to be reassessed, in part because senior managers now face liability for potential meltdowns. Stress tests overseen by regulators are more severe than in the past. All this should be encouraging, up to a point.

Yet in reality the core ethos of financial markets – picking up pennies in front of a steamroller – has not fundamentally changed. There is still a relationship between risk and reward, and big winners take bigger risks. OK, so people might not be trading “collateralised debt obligations” (CDOs) any more – the financial weapon of mass destruction that ruined that fun game of bankers’ Jenga. But cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin and the like) have emerged as a new plaything for the financially adventurous. There is still plenty of risk about, as calamitous falls in the Turkish currency have recently reminded us.

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Supposedly legitimate financial practices, such as share buy-backs, still dominate orthodox thinking. A buy-back is carried out by a business when it has surplus capital and can’t think of anything else it wants to do with it. So it simply buys its own shares, pushing up its share price and keeping investors happy for the time being. (The higher share price also triggers much bigger executive pay – more on that in a moment.) But buy-backs starve businesses of useful investment in new technology and increased productive capacity. If you want to know why productivity and pay remain so low, start looking here. The orthodoxy of buy-backs is actually killing business, slowly. So yes, we should still be worried.

And what else do those excessive top pay packages tell us? That, deep down, a lot of elite players in this system know how fragile it all still is. They are filling their boots while their luck lasts. They know that, in spite of all the regulatory reform, it could still be impossible to spot or avert another huge financial crisis. Do we really know what is going on up on those trading floors in the shiny glass towers? Is a switch about to be flicked on a trade that is about to bring the system crashing down again? We have had 10 years of apparent stability. We are due another shock.

So yes, don’t get too upset about a reunion of ex-Lehman employees. They deserve a drink. Worry instead about wasteful, unproductive capitalism that makes a tiny percentage of people very rich while others worry about their own and their families’ futures.

• Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management and the former director of the High Pay Centre