We are now in the third year of the international financial crisis and just over a year on from its peak, when on September 15, 2008, the US financial authorities allowed the investment bank Lehman Brothers to fail.
This failure brought the international financial system to the brink of collapse, as it created a situation of extreme tension and widespread distrust regarding the solvency of financial institutions, which caused all available funding in global money and credit markets to disappear, with the risk that the international banking system would collapse entirely.
