EDITORIAL: Ripples from crisis of 2008
The weight of the crisis fell on ordinary people, mostly the middle classes, and it has tended to exacerbate inequality
On this weekend 10 years ago, US investment bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, triggering the Great Recession. The anniversary invites a host of questions, some of which are answerable, some not. What has changed since then? Could the global recession that followed have been avoided? Are we safer now than we were then? These are all mighty issues that include everything from the grand theories of modern economics to more specific questions about the nature of banking and banking regulation. They even stray into the sociopolitical construction of the modern era and human psychology. But in the beginning was the dramatic unravelling of a grand, century-old institution, Lehman Brothers. The bank had aggressively ridden two historical waves: the global rise in the value of real estate, which was closely allied to the creation of new financial instruments designed to leverage the profitability of this change. It was, in short, an asset bubble placed on top of a financial transacti...
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