Banks completed a full circle in 2008, as famed lenders from New York to Tokyo turned beggars who lined up for bailouts from their respective Governments.
The over a century-old institution Lehman Brothers became almost a symbol of all that went wrong in the global financial sector, even as more than two dozen banks in the US went belly-up.
The rescue acts for many more of them involved the Governments buying stakes in the distressed banks putting to rest the talks of privatisation and globalisation.
Across the world, the Governments spent in excess of 10 trillion dollars in their bailout attempts, most of which went into the coffers of the banks struggling under the debris of the global crisis — the deepest since The Great Depression of 1930s.
Right from regulators to regulations and complex instruments to collective failures in the US, came under severe criticism. But before the blame game ended, the crisis spread across continents pushing financial institutions into the verge of collapse.
If the US saw Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual crashing, the UK witnessed the tumbling of famed names like HBOS, StanChart and Barclays.
Just a set of numbers would reflect the intensity of the turmoil: So far this year, 25 banks have gone bust in the US, whereas in the past eight years, only 52 banks went belly up in the country.