The start of a new golden age

A year on from the collapse of Lehman Brothers and this is being marked as the anniversary of the credit crunch in common parlance, even though the reality was this single day was only part of the rebalancing of financial markets and economies, which is still unfolding.

The ‘credit crunch,’ a lazy expression much used by national television and radio stations, had in fact started in late 2006 with the steady rise of bad loans amongst regional banks in the US, before really accelerating in August 2007 with the knock-on slowdown in the UK housing market. The day Lehman’s collapse has become a neat point to draw a line under one half of the events to allow us to start talking about the recovery. Of course in many ways the financial markets reacted to Lehman’s in the way they do to every piece of news – they fall on a wall of worry and then begin to recl...