News of mass Floridian mortgage defaults clouded 2006. The US entered a technical recession in 2007. Unemployment reached double-digits as late as 2009.
Because a date helps to concentrate the mind, a financial crisis that was experienced as a fragmented chain of events is being commemorated as just one: the fall of Lehman Brothers, 10 years ago next month.
The arbitrariness of the decennial can be excused. The emphasis on the crash as the cause of all that has followed is harder to defend. It has become a convenient Year Zero: the supposed beginning of the political distemper that carried Donald Trump to the White House in 2016. It “lit a match”, Steve Bannon, his former adviser, and usually a taker of the long view, said last month. “And the explosion was Trump.”