In 2008, the collapse of the global financial markets had immense economic repercussions. It smashed the value of investments, including the funds investing the pension pots on which most Developed World workers were depending for their retirement. It also destroyed jobs. The drying up of credit drove small and medium sized enterprises out of business. Many economies were faced with recession. Incomes fell. Primary resource producers in Third World countries suffered a collapse in the price of their raw materials.

All of this was caused by the lunatic behavior of a relatively few financial wizards who lent billions of dollars to borrowers who should never have been assessed as a good risk. But for the self-styled Masters of the Universe, particularly in the big US and European investment banks, cutting deals, earning fat fees and even fatter bonuses was more important than the quality of those deals. The key trick was to keep generating more deals, like spinning more and more plates on the tops of poles.

And in 2008 the plates began to fall and smash. The sub-prime scandal was an object lesson in greed and madness, in the deeply unsound and questionable decisions of a small number of financial supremos. It was only a marginal consolation that a clutch of bankers from Lehman Bros came unstuck. They had been in China advising local banks how to run themselves more efficiently, when they discovered that their own bank had gone bankrupt and their corporate credit cards no longer worked when they tried to book themselves first class tickets home.

But what has always been utterly galling about this colossal financial debacle was that hardly any of those responsible were held to account for practices that, when stripped of their marketing and technical jargon, were in effect, totally fraudulent. A few top bankers lost their jobs but generally retired with handsome pensions, not forgetting generous severance payments. One or two were subject to public shaming, such at Fred West at the UK’s Royal Bank of Scotland which, thanks to reckless expansion and gross mis-selling of worthless securities, had to have a $61 billion government bailout, but they still could hide themselves away with their millions.

Among the few countries to punish errant bankers, was Ireland, whose Celtic Tiger economy imploded under a mass of foolhardy debt. A number of bankers have been jailed for fraud but now the former boss of the collapsed Allied-Irish bank David Drumm has been found guilty of a multibillion-dollar fraud. Drumm and fellow top executives at the bank fixed its balance sheet to make it seem solvent when it was already bankrupt. The bailout cost Dublin $41 billion. Extradited from America last year, Drumm is expected to receive a long jail sentence.

In the view of some lawyers, there are many other senior bankers who ought to be in jail but will never now be brought to justice. This might not be so bad were it not for the startling reality that the whole sub-prime scandal looks to be happening again, this time with US automobile rather than housing loans. These are being parceled up into high earning securities by banks which ought to know better. But perhaps what is more amazing is that investors are buying these securities. Will the financial markets never learn?