Issue Of The Week: The Credit Crunch, Ten Years On

A decade after the start of the most damaging crash in history, is the financial system any safer?

- 

When the financial crisis that caused “the near death of the global banking system” began in August 2007, many participants reacted like the generals in August 1914, said The Guardian: “they thought it would be over by Christmas”. But the complacency soon vanished. The first indication of trouble had come when the French bank BNP Paribas froze three of its funds on 9 August, citing a “complete evaporation of liquidity” because of problems in the US sub-prime market. That, as Northern Rock boss Adam Applegarth later observed, was “the day the world changed”. Within a month, the “credit crunch” had triggered a catastrophic run on the British lender. A year later the full hurricane arrived, said Iain Dey in The Sunday Times. The dramatic collapse of the Wall Street bank Lehman Brothers was swiftly followed by t