NOTHING personal, but for a while I could not stand the sight of Robert Peston. It was 11 years ago today, September 13, 2007, that the then BBC business editor broke the news that the Bank of England was stepping in to save Northern Rock. Cue panic and long queues outside the lender as customers scrambled to get their money out.

The now ITV political editor looked set to become a regular harbinger of doom about the economy. But then it all went quiet. Too quiet. Despite the first run on a British bank for 140 years, life appeared to carry on pretty much as normal, albeit Labour nationalised Northern Rock. What innocents we were to think that might be it, panic over. It was only getting started.

Others trace the beginning of the global financial crisis to September 15, 2008, the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Or perhaps you prefer the great bank bail out day of October 13, 2008, shortly before which the then Chancellor Alistair Darling was told by Royal Bank of Scotland it had just enough cash to last for couple of hours, then the cashpoints would be empty. See the average zombie apocalypse movie for what might have happened next had Mr Darling not acted.

Yet the signs were there long before any of those dates that something awful was coming the way of capitalism. Those who queued outside the Northern Rock knew it. It is no accident that most were people old enough to have lived through previous crashes and scares. Some of them had seen the real McCoy in the 1930s, or remembered their parents’ tales. This was not unfounded panic; this was muscle memory kicking in.

Thank heavens everything sorted itself out. Haven’t you heard the good news? Just in time for the ten year anniversary of the Great Crash, the Office for National Statistics released data showing UK wages going up, with employment taking the same direction and unemployment falling (though Scotland is bucking the trend in the latter two categories, year on year). It is a long way from “we’ve never had it so good” territory, but considering how bad the last ten years have been, one could be forgiven for cracking open a packet of wine gums in celebration.

Then again, perhaps we should not be too hasty. If we can draw any conclusion from the last decade it is surely that there is a long way to go before the fallout from the crash makes itself known fully. Without meaning to “do a Peston”, it could be that we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Consider this the Bachman-Turner Overdrive response to contemporary events. Given the way most political and economic theory has been turned on its head these past ten years, it is as good a guide as any. Last year, the estimable journalist Alex Brummer made a film for Newsnight about Northern Rock and its aftermath. He asked Adair Turner, former chair of the "light touch" Financial Services Authority, how it, and the financial establishment in general, could have got things so wrong. He replied: “The FSA was making enormous mistakes but it was making mistakes against a set of intellectual assumptions deeply held by some of the most lauded economists across the world, and by most of the central banks, which in retrospect were just complete rubbish.” Complete. Rubbish. Put that in your memory bank.

Some consequences of the recession appear obvious but put them up to the light and they soon take on a nine bob note look. It is widely held, for example, that without the financial crisis there would have been no austerity. Yet benefit cuts, wage caps and job losses were not inevitable; austerity was a political choice made by George Osborne and championed by the coalition government and the Conservative administration thereafter.

We are on slightly firmer ground in tracing a line between financial hard times and the rise of populism. Without the crash, would there have been a Trump, an Orban, a populist government in Italy? Would there have been Brexit?

Again, there was nothing predestined about any of this. Large parts of the UK had been grumbling about Europe since the start of membership. Donald Trump was elected in 2016, eight years after the crash, and when the Obama administration was claiming credit, rightly so, for an economy that had been turned around. Viktor Orban, currently in the EU dock over Hungary’s treatment of migrants, was first elected in 2010, before the start of the war in Syria led to a sharp increase in the number of people fleeing to Europe.

At many a point, different decisions could have been made that might have led to alternative outcomes. No David Cameron, no panic over UKIP, no Brexit. No Hillary, no Trump.

How about the Scottish independence referendum result? Would the electorate been less wary of going it alone if the crash had not happened? They might at least have been more sceptical about expert predictions of doom. What was it Adair Turner called all those shiny, pre-crash assumptions about the financial system? Ah yes, “complete rubbish”.

One thing has emerged from the dust clouds of the last decade. Damaged, feeling rather sorry for itself, if betrayed it can still turn to anger: it is our old friend, trust. It is not much in vogue among young people, the ones who have come of age since 2008. Unlike previous generations, they have had to accept that life may not be better for them than it was for their parents. No jobs for life. No homes of their own guaranteed. Uncertainty the only certainty.

Pretty bleak, but better to be cautiously realistic than recklessly optimistic, as the developed world had been before the first crash, and the second. Who knows: such a change in mindset might prevent a third.

Yet already there are voices, loudest in the US, clamouring for less regulation, more letting rip economically. For a UK equivalent, try the Brexiters and their quarter-baked plans to turn the UK into Singapore. All this despite soaring debt levels and tricky times ahead with Brexit. Whatever happens in the next ten years, months, or days, let us toast to not being fooled again.