The financial crisis brought many of Britain's high street banks into public ownership and left many of Wall Street's biggest names in ruins. Bankers who thought they had created new financial instruments which would all but eliminate risk were proved spectacularly wrong.
Five years on, with governments still struggling under the weight of the debts they were forced to take on from the banks, profits are returning in the City, and with them the notorious bonuses.
The day of reckoning for bankers may have been postponed, but have lessons been learned?
Anat Admati, a Stanford economist, doubts that they have, and her new book (co-authored with Martin Hellwig) The Bankers' New Clothes is a searing critique of the industry's recent history.
She joins Heather Stewart to discuss the future of financial regulation - and how the banks convinced politicians they should be treated as a special case.
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