Nine years after the onset of the international financial crisis, its effects are still with us.

These days observers worry about banks — European institutions like Germany’s Deutsche Bank, France’s Societé Generale, and Italy’s Monte di Pascoale, not to mention the zombie banks that populate the austerity-ridden eurozone periphery in Greece, Portugal, and Spain. These big banks are widely seen as global capitalism’s next weak link, capable of causing massive financial instability if they go bust.

Such concern isn’t particularly surprising — banks were at the center of the latest crisis from the beginning. Indeed, it wasn’t subprime market defaults that unleashed the destructive financial turmoil of 2007–8, but their ruinous impact on a major investment bank, Lehman Brothers. Lehman’s failure — and the state’s subsequent refusal to bail out the bank — created a credit crunch that sent the entire financial sector, as well as the world economy, into a tailspin.