Indeed the model, while still fragile, is more prevalent than it was before. Very little has been done to ‘reform’ or transform the flawed design of an economic architecture that caused destruction of value on a global scale, bankrupted thousands of companies, led to millions of job losses and lowered incomes everywhere. That a movie about fraudulent traders and a far-seeing hedge-fund manager should still seem relevant is as it should be, because the economic model that encouraged reckless and fraudulent practices in the market of dodgy mortgages is still with us. That the crisis is ongoing should come as no surprise.

Today financial volatility is centred on ‘emerging’ markets, in particular China, and has unnerved financial markets around the globe. On the contrary, it has rolled around from the US sub-prime housing market and Wall Street and on to the Eurozone, where Greece, Cyprus and Portugal were in the eye of the storm. It ends with the systemic failure of the system in 2007-09 – a crisis that has not gone away. It could be argued that the movie is late, and even outdated but it is not.

This set the context for the arrival in Britain of Adam McKay’s The Big Short – a film about the American sub-prime mortgage meltdown, based on the book by Michael Lewis. As I write, global capital markets appear to be stabilising after another period of intense, and scary, stock-market volatility.

Watch the big short online