Not everything that has happened in these last 10 years can be traced back to the financial crisis: the iPhone was, after all, launched in 2007. But nearly everything can be. The financial fallout remains palpable. Old ideas about annual pay rises and meaningful interest on savings have vanished, while food banks have become part of society’s furniture.
Just as significant as the economic consequences are, however, the many, more diffuse effects—from a narrowing, nostalgic culture of comfort food and historical fiction (Hephzibah Anderson, p34), to the wild, wide-open and polarised politics (which I describe on p30). There is simply no hope of making sense of the way that the world has gone over this decade, without first going back to the tremors first felt on the money markets 10 summers ago. Everyone from George Osborne to Jeremy Corbyn can agree that everything has changed in the long shadow of the crisis, but that is where all agreement ends. For much of the time in much of the world, austerity has been the reigning idea since, but it has always been bitterly divisive. In Britain, after seven long years of retrenchment and often-anaemic growth, it now appears that the approach is being quietly abandoned (Robert Skidelsky, p5). There is, however, little serious thinking—still less any consensus—on what comes next.