This moment – a decade since the global financial crisis – is an ellipsis. We are between destinations, with no reliable map and uncertain co-ordinates. In September 2008 the fourth-largest US investment bank, Lehman Brothers, founded in 1850, filed for bankruptcy. It looked as if the global financial order, even capitalism itself, was next. Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of PIMCO, a large US investment management firm, asked his wife to withdraw as much money as possible from the ATM in case the banks didn’t open.1 An anonymous hedge fund manager in New York fired off a short email to a journalist: ‘It feels a little like the end of the world.’2
Global seismic events like those of 10 years ago are revelatory because the interests of power become nakedly clear
