The Guardian view on the great financial crash: new thinking needed | Editorial

Politicians have failed to come up with a transformation in how we view the role of the state and market

Ten years ago tomorrow, the US government allowed the Wall Street bank Lehman Brothers to go bust, an event that seemed to mark a historical denouement: the end of an American century culminating in humiliating failure of its economic policy. In the days that followed, the shock waves crippled other major institutions, petrified money markets and ultimately destroyed millions of jobs. The banking crisis was transatlantic: German lenders were bailed out, in Ireland the state stood behind bank liabilities three times the size of the nation's GDP, and in Britain one of the biggest banks in the world, RBS, was nationalised. The only comparable event was the great depression of the 1930s. As the historian Adam Tooze, in his magisterial work Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, points out, "global industrial output, stock markets and trade were all falling at least as fast in 2008-2009 as they had in 1929".

The economic consequences of events a decade ago are still reverberating through politics. While ordinary workers in advanced economies saw public services cut, wages stagnate and living standards fall, the state saved the collapsing financial system by creating money and cutting interest rates. In the US, while the banks and lenders were bailed out, more than 9 million American families lost their homes to banks or were forced to sell up. In Britain, bankers' bonuses are almost back to pre-crisis levels, while the nation endures the longest period of wage stagnation since the 1860s. The 2008 financial crash exposed the US Federal Reserve as the vital link in a global chain of a few dozen banks. According to Mr Tooze, the Fed's unpublicised role was to bail out the world. It provided about $5tn in liquidity and loan guarantees to large non-American banks. It also sent $10tn to foreign central banks through currency swaps. All this money was eventually repaid, with interest, but it was nevertheless made available to the banks, their shareholders and their outrageously remunerated staff who had, through acts of commission or acts of omission, brought the world to its knees.