Being relatively long of tooth and of a cynical disposition I thought I was beyond naive optimism. But listening to Barack Obama’s inauguration speech last January, in which the president spoke of a collective failure to make hard choices, I believed I was witnessing a moment of significant change. This appetite for financial system reform was also present in many other countries, with the collective response to the credit crisis best summed up as “never again”.

Eight months on and politicians are still paying lip service to the idea of wholesale reform. “We cannot put the world in the position where things might go back to where they were at the start of the boom,” said US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner after the G20 finance ministers meeting in early September, a prelude to this week’s G20 summit in Pittsburgh. But the optimism I felt at the start of the year has seeped away. Despite the considerable efforts of policymakers and regulators, nothing much will really change.