The anniversary of August 9 looms. Inevitably, much of the attention since the markets seized up last summer has been focused on day-to-day fire fighting. But now we must also do the hard thinking about how to stop such fires from starting in the first place. The saying goes that once you have seen one financial crisis, you have seen one financial crisis. Yet the broader lessons, for the UK in particular, are becoming clearer.

First, we need to fix the tripartite oversight regime designed by the former chancellor of the exchequer Gordon Brown. It failed its first serious test over Northern Rock and that failure has cast a pall over the UK’s reputation since. It is surely no coincidence that the start of the sharp devaluation of sterling dates almost precisely from the moment when the world saw depositors queuing on British high streets.