The financial crisis laid waste to a system, says RUTH SUNDERLAND, now is the time to build on it

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This year marks a full decade since the financial crisis reached its zenith. 

It is still casting a shadow, and, in darker moments, it’s tempting to think we have learned nothing from it. But I’m starting 2018 in an optimistic frame of mind.

I don’t want to be Panglossian. 

Ten years ago, as business editor on another newspaper, I was writing about the need to redraw the relationship between companies and the rest of society and for an end to exploitative cowboy capitalism.

The culture has changed, but unacceptable pockets remain. 

In the US, the epicentre of the crisis, the big beasts of Wall Street, pictured, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, are more powerful than ever

For proof, look no further than the egregious incentives handed to housebuilding bosses at Persimmon, Berkeley and elsewhere. Builders, if they are not careful, will be the new bankers.

And some of the old bankers are still in their pomp. 

In the US, the epicentre of the crisis, the big beasts of Wall Street, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, are more powerful than ever. The same men, Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon are still in charge.

Admittedly here in Britain, the only major bank chief executive still in the same job a decade on is Virgin Money’s Jayne-Anne Gadhia – but none of the crisis-era bosses has been punished with anything worse than the loss of a knighthood.

In previous decades, the financial sector came up with genuinely useful ideas, such as the cash machine. 

The biggest innovation spawned out of the crisis, however, is Bitcoin, which was created out of distrust of conventional banking and is now threatening to become the biggest bubble the world has ever seen.  

Bitcoin, pictured, was created out of distrust of conventional banking and is now threatening to become the biggest bubble the world has ever seen

Plenty of commentators are also worried that stock markets, particularly in the US where traders are exuberant thanks to President Trump’s tax cuts, are heading for a fall.

Despite all of this, and the fears of business over Brexit, there are many reasons to be positive.

The banks are safer now, and have much more capital. 

They have been forced to make reparations over scandals such as PPI and now HBOS Reading. They will be cut down to size, if not by regulation then by technology, which will make the whole business of payments and loans cheaper and more transparent.

The contempt for industry which marred political and economic thinking before the crisis has now gone.

We have rediscovered manufacturing – and remembered we are very good at it.

An emblem of that is the site of the Battle of Orgreave, where miners clashed with the police in the 1980s coal strike. It is now an advanced manufacturing park, one of the most impressive hotbeds of innovation I have seen.

Industrial strife has been replaced by the inventiveness of British companies such as supercar maker McLaren and Metalysis, a Cambridge University spin-out that is producing titanium powder to be used in 3D printing for car and plane parts.

And even as recently as 10 years ago, the idea that companies were dominated by white males was relatively unchallenged. 

There are still not enough women or ethnic minorities in boardrooms but the need to attract more is now part of mainstream business thought, when it would once have been dismissed as soppy Leftish tosh.

An index of how far we have come is that no one sensible bats an eyelid that the most powerful central banker in the world – Janet Yellen at the US Federal Reserve, soon to step down – is female, and so is the most important European political leader, Angela Merkel.

The crisis laid waste to a system, much of which was corrupt and dangerous anyway, so good riddance. 

It did not damage human capital – our intelligence, energy and entrepreneurial drive – but was a huge catalyst for us all to make better use of it. 

Much of the past ten years has been absorbed in the biggest financial clean-up effort the world has ever seen. Now is the time to build on it.