The 2008 financial crisis erased $11 trillion in household wealth, yet half of the poorest American families saw no decline, because they had no investments to lose. This episode starts decades before the crash, with the 1999 repeal of key parts of the Glass-Steagall Act, a political push for affordable housing, and cheap money from the Federal Reserve. Lenders sold adjustable rate subprime mortgages with low teaser rates, and Wall Street bundled them into mortgage-backed securities whose top slices carried AAA ratings.

The models behind those ratings assumed that American home prices would never fall everywhere at once. When rates rose from 2004 to 2006 and payments reset, defaults spread, and the securities and the credit default swaps written on them turned toxic. Banks stopped lending to one another, governments answered with rescues on a scale never seen before, and the question of who paid for it all still shapes public trust in finance.

• Bear Stearns was sold to JPMorgan Chase in March 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were seized on September 7, and Lehman Brothers filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history on September 15.
• The TED spread, a gauge of how much banks distrust each other, spiked to a record 4.65 percent.
• Congress created the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, and central banks bought $2.5 trillion in debt and troubled assets in the fourth quarter of 2008 alone.
• Some 8.7 million American jobs were lost, unemployment peaked at 10 percent in October 2009, and the Dow fell 53 percent from its peak.
• Of 47 bankers jailed worldwide, more than half were in Iceland, while the United States imprisoned one: Kareem Serageldin of Credit Suisse, sentenced to 30 months.