It is one year this weekend since the demise of Lehman Brothers, and the consensus of opinion is pretty clear: we should have saved it and it has been a disaster to let it fail. Although not the first event in the crisis, the theory goes that Lehman’s collapse led to dislocations in the credit markets, and later in the rest of the global economy, that were far worse than would have transpired had it been saved.

There have been thousands of job losses in the banking industry, millions in the economy as a whole. Investors are poorer thanks to the destruction that has been wrought on the valuation of the world's companies. There have been personal tragedies - lives ended prematurely thanks to the impact of the crisis.