Between January and September 2007, starting in the US housing market, the world we thought we knew started to crumble (Edmonds, 2010). Banks – increasingly dependent on mind-boggling algorithmic models – believed they had figured out a way to marketise risk associated with towering Western consumption and debt by blending precarious mortgages with other securities in alchemical investment products so fiendishly complex that, when rising interest rates finally precipitated the rapid spread of defaults and everything started to unravel, no one was able to say where the toxicity lay or how far the contagion would spread.

It was, by many estimates, the worst financial crisis since 1929, ushering in a global recession whose repercussions have expanded and intensified, rippling outwards from financial to economic, economic to social, social to political. In the ensuing decade, as countries struggled to cope and livelihoods suffered, we saw the unwritten and, as it turns out, unenforceable law of human aspiration – that the lives of our children will exceed the limits of ours – dissolve in a fog of turmoil and uncertainty (Barnichon et al, 2018; Cribb and Johnson, 2018; Oxenford, 2018).

Emerging economies were hit by a wave of sharply reversing capital flows. Poor countries were struck by the next wave as demand for primary commodities tumbled and growth contracted. In the most vulnerable countries, 130 million people were pushed back into the poverty world leaders had, a few years earlier, pledged to make history (Griffith-Jones and Ocampo, 2009; World Bank, 2009; Mustapha, 2014; Roderick, 2014; UNESCAP, 2018). Across high-income countries, response to the crisis came in two parts. Between 2009 and 2017, central banks pumped some USD$12 trillion of quantitative easing into the global financial system. On the heels of quantitative easing, however, came a different animal – austerity. In what can only be described as a breath-taking piece of political legerdemain, the crisis was placed firmly at the door of out-of-control government spending, the response to which was to institute some of the most swingeingly punitive cuts to welfare spending in living memory (Ginn, 2013; Lupton et al, 2016).