A view of Canary Wharf in east London, taken from a pretty park near Catford, south of the River Thames. Once a thriving dockyard, Canary Wharf is now host to the main/European headquarters of some of the largest financial institutions in the world. In the distance, you'll see the European HQs of HSBC, Citibank, and JP Morgan Chase.

You know, it occurred to me the other day that it's been 15 years since the Royal Bank of Scotland, which at the time was the biggest bank in the world in terms of balance sheet, almost collapsed and nearby brought the entire British banking system down with it. After the financial turmoil brought about by the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the great financial institutions of the world - headed by the self-styled "Masters of the Universe" - began asking themselves who would be next. Surely it wouldn't be RBS, which at the end of 2007 had reported record profits? Well, if a bank will spend almost all its cash reserves buying a struggling Dutch bank, meaning that its operating model relied on borrowing billions of pounds every day only to pay it back again the next day... well, you can see how this can easily go wrong if other banks don't want to lend to you anymore.

The day the other banks decided to stop lending to RBS was the 7th of October 2008, when RBS's shares fell by a third as investors lost all confidence in the bank's ability to pay back any money they loaned it. It was only by massive government intervention (which partly nationalised the bank) that the bank remained solvent, and a nightmare scenario was avoided, a situation poetically described by BBC journalist Robert Peston as "get under the duvet with a shotgun and a tin of baked beans".

Hope you enjoy!