The world the crash made

With September marking a decade since the Lehman Brothers implosion, stand by for a slew of economic retrospectives. Any meaningful analysis, though, needs to get beyond historic balance sheets and plunging share price graphs — however dramatic the data.

For the most significant impact of the biggest financial and economic upheaval since the Great Depression has been the growing loss of faith in western liberal capitalism. Politics has been upended by the 2008 crisis — doing much to explain Trump, Corbyn and the broader shift away from centrist parties towards extremes.

The demise of Lehmans, a once-impregnable investment bank, exposed a US financial sector riddled with chronic debts and fraud. That sparked a peak-to-trough plunge of more than 40 per cent across western stock markets — the deepest since the 1929 Wall Street crash.

The ensuing recession saw global trade shrink by a fifth, costing the world economy some $10 trillion (over a sixth of 2008 global GDP).