We let the 2007 financial crisis go to waste | Torsten Bell

Attlee and Roosevelt built a fairer world off the back of economic catastrophe. We've failed at that today

It's not the time passing, it's the opportunity for retrospection that kills you. Or at least that's how it feels looking back a full 10 years to the day when I was working in the Treasury as we got the news that the French bank BNP Paribas had frozen funds exposed to US sub-prime mortgages. The crunch part of the "credit crunch" had arrived, and with it a chain of historic events that led to the first bank run in Britain in over 100 years and the collapse of Lehman Brothers just over a year later. Looking back over that decade is not pretty, and should leave us asking: is this really the best we can do?

Related: Credit crunch, 10 years on: fate of RBS shows global crisis is not over

For all the talk of ever increasing income inequality, it has been broadly flat in recent years

Related: A decade after the financial meltdown, its underlying problems haven't been fixed