13 years after the GFC: Has anything really changed?

IT has been almost 13 years since the start of the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, now known as the Great Financial Crisis (GFC), that led to the bankruptcy and closure of US investment banks like Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns.

It also spawned new phrases in the stock market lexicon, such as "too big to fail" which in turn justified the introduction of "quantitative easing" (QE) and "tapering".

That crisis led to new forms of consumer protection, the most notable being the United States Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, that were aimed at bringing about sweeping reform of the financial landscape and protecting naive investors from predatory financial practices.