As November prepares to unfurl its drizzly cloak and Europe plunges into its fifth dark winter of financial crisis, it is easy to become gloomier over the extent to which we are still in a quagmire and ask why still no one knows the way out.

In five long years, the crisis has undergone something akin to the model of grief proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a pioneer of near-death studies. First there was denial (surely it was only Lehman/only in the US/not us, Sir!), anger (why didn't we see this coming?), bargaining (with regulators, mainly), and more recently, as crisis metastasised from Lehman to Europe, Whalegate and Liborgate, the depression set in. By September this year, the banks looked like they were reinterpreting their figures and began a series of job cuts that set the tone for a dismal autumn and led to fears of a "Christmas bloodbath".