Before 2008 there were five enormous investment banks on Wall Street. These were not banks with tellers and branches looking after ordinary people and businesses. These were the deal makers.

As the financial crisis unfolded, first Bears Sterns got into trouble and the federal Reserve and Treasury orchestrated a controversial shotgun marriage with JP Morgan Chase. Merrill Lynch disappeared into Bank of America in similar circumstances. Two down.

Then on 15th September 2008 the Fed and Treasury decided not to do a similar deal for Lehman Brothers and it went bankrupt. Three down.

Immediately all hell broke loose. The last two, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were under extreme pressure. And so was the Government. To avoid total calamity Mitsubishi Bank and Warren Buffet rode to the rescue with billions and Morgan and Goldman were forcibly converted into normal regulated banks. That allowed the Fed to pump in more billions of dollars to hold the two ships upright. It just worked. Sort of. But for investment banking it was five out of five down.

Wall Street investment banking had disappeared. Banking would never be the same again. (The best account I have read of this saga is “Too Big to Fail” by Andrew Ross Sorkin. It’s as breath-taking a read as anything by John le Carre).

As the years have rolled by, investigators and regulators have peered into the murky practices of these enormous Wall Street institutions. Collectively they have been fined or settled damages amounting to more than $50 billion (that’s after just my quick look, it’s bound to be bigger). But not a single senior executive has been charged, let alone gone to goal.

Needless to say the reputation of the banks, particularly Goldman and more recently JP Morgan, has been on the nose among the majority. (Remember Occupy Wall Street.) But not to worry. A huge lobbying effort in Washington means those who do matter are still friendly enough.

Banks are in no danger of being properly regulated by Washington, that’s for sure. The failure to learn from 2008 and sufficiently change banking practices will surely lead to more calamity in future.

There is an occasional lighter side (for this Sunday morning read). Last week someone at JP Morgan Chase decided they would use a Twitter hashtag event to try to get a positive conversation going, and perhaps improve the general public perception of the bank. But the users took over and JPM lost control of the conversation. #AskJPM was hastily shut down by the embarrassed bank. Here, courtesy of the Big Picture blog by Barry Ritholz, is a selection of the tweets. Sums up JPM quite nicely in my view …

Remember also that Goldman secretly helped the Greek Government cook the books to make Greece look good enough to enter the Eurozone in 2001. Look how well that has played out now for the average Greek!

They are indeed an out-of-control bunch … they make Gordon Gecko look amateur …