Ten years on: was it right to bail out the banks?

During the 2008 financial crisis, taxpayers had no choice but to underwrite the entire banking industry. And we're still doing it, says John Stepek.

180913-bailout

Banks are still big enough to blow a hole in the global economy, so profits are privatised while losses are socialised
(Image credit: 2009 Getty Images)

Ten years ago, any illusion that we operated within a framework of free market capitalism was completely shattered (or at least, it should have been, even though people still throw around the words as though they mean something).

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.