But it didn't collapse. The banking industry and the rest of the financial system are still here. The traders are still trading. The mortgage brokers are still broking. And the credit-default-swap writers are still writing. Banks are lending again and borrowers are borrowing again. And despite a lot of grumbling and raised eyebrows, bankers are getting bonuses again.

 

Quite a few folks suggested at the time that the financial system ought to be altered so that it's not capable of destroying itself quite so quickly again. But it's pretty hard to interpret the actual changes implemented around the world as having been anywhere near the scale of the financial crisis.

So who cares about that? Markets are rising, economic growth is picking up, and people even seem to be getting jobs again. Who can even really remember that there ever was a problem?

The reason we are all able to carry on investing and borrowing, forgetting about market reform and just behaving as if there never was a huge meltdown just the other day is the phenomenon of selective memory. We are really bad at remembering bad stuff and really good at remembering good stuff.

This is the reason that people get married four or five times, why gamblers keep walking into casinos and why anyone goes to Adam Sandler movies. We remember the one or two positive moments and forget the endless pain and anguish that surrounded them.

And it's a good thing, too. If our primitive ancestors had dwelled too much on the times they were attacked by sabre-tooth tigers and half their group were eaten, or the times they got so cold that they could hardly move, or the times that their mobile phones ran out of batteries right when they received that call they were waiting all day for, well they would have struggled to get out of bed in the morning.

Working in mergers and acquisitions is a perfect illustration of this. If I come up with an idea that I think might result in a deal, I have to go pitch it to someone. Often I will have to pitch it to several people.

Each pitch involves me leafing through a PowerPoint presentation and trying to convince the client that I have a good idea and that they ought to hire me to execute it. And each pitch gets harder and harder as I am obliged to tell the same story again and dig deeper and deeper to feign a consistently convincing level of enthusiasm.

Sometimes they won't call me back. Sometimes they will be convinced that the idea was good, but won't hire me and they hire one of my competitors instead. Sometimes they will hire me and it will turn out that the idea wasn't so good after all. Or that the idea was almost right and a lot of negotiation and cajoling is necessary to convince everyone to go ahead.

But every now and again it actually works. The client likes the idea, they hire my bank, and the whole thing comes together in a success for everyone.

And every time I manage to finish a deal I am somehow able to completely forget all of the tedium and struggle that it took to get there. For a little while I can enjoy a sense of achievement and experience that elusive sensation of job satisfaction.

This generally lasts right up until the following day when I start at the beginning again on a new deal.

There is, of course, also the small detail that a successful deal means fees for the bank and a bonus for me. Receiving that bonus is itself another moment of forgetfulness. Each day that my bank balance rises further erases the memory of the times when it was falling.

And so I can go ahead and invest in stocks and bonds and other precarious financial instruments that I suppose could very well collapse at any moment. But really, it's such a long time since anything like that happened, I can hardly even remember.