For the past 20 years or so, as a business columnist for The New York Times, I’ve had a front-row seat for bull and bear markets, scandals, crises and management mischief.

But I am leaving The Times, and this is my last shot at Fair Game. So it seems a fitting moment to look back at what’s changed and what hasn’t in the financial world, for better or worse.

In addition to a string of garden-variety banking and business scandals, four seismic financial events occurred during my time as a columnist: the collapse of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund in 1998, the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, the accounting scandals of Enron in 2001 and WorldCom in 2002, and the mother of them all — the mortgage debacle — in 2008. That one brought world economies to the precipice and wiped out Lehman Brothers and a raft of troubled banks.

That many episodes of financial tumult in two decades seem like a lot.

Some of this turmoil has generated positive change. Accounting scandals, for example, have been much rarer since Enron and WorldCom shook the financial markets. One reason: a 2002 federal law, known as Sarbanes-Oxley, requiring top executives to attest to the accuracy of their companies’ financial statements.