It was set up by this coalition Government to learn the lessons of what went so catastrophically wrong: a decade long debt-fuelled boom that ended in a Dramatic Financial Crisis, a deep recession and a debt overhang that is still holding back our economy; a regulatory system that totally failed to spot enormous imbalances building up and proved incapable of dealing with the crisis when it first broke; and, most importantly in the context of this report, huge global banks that turned out to be "too big to fail", so that taxpayers were called upon for many billions of pounds in order to prevent a financial meltdown.

It was set up by the coalition Government to learn the lessons of what went so catastrophically wrong: a decade-long, debt-fuelled boom that ended in a Dramatic Financial Crisis, a deep recession and a debt overhang that is still holding back our economy; a regulatory system that totally failed to spot enormous imbalances building up and proved incapable of dealing with the crisis when it first broke; and most importantly, in the context of this report, huge global banks that turned out to be “too big to fail”, so that taxpayers were called upon for many billions of pounds in order to prevent a financial meltdown.

In his Statement, my right honourable friend the Chancellor also reminded us that we are in, "a decade-long, debt-fuelled boom that ended in a Dramatic Financial Crisis, a deep recession and a debt overhang that is still holding back our economy".