The bankers trooping out of their offices in Canary Wharf on September 16, 2008, had only to look up to appreciate that they were at the epicentre of a financial earthquake. “Wall Street rocked by Lehman failure — FTSE tumbles on Lehman failure,” read the live ticker on the Reuters building opposite Lehman Brothers’ London headquarters, reminding the newly jobless workers — their belongings hastily packed into cardboard boxes — that the bank’s collapse was far from an ordinary bankruptcy.

The “Lehman moment” has come to symbolise a crisis that began in American real estate before ricocheting around the world, triggering a stock-market crash and the deepest recession since the Great Depression. The aftershocks are still being felt a decade later.

The crisis — unprecedented