It has been a disaster for an industry where the UK was once a world leader, and which generated hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs, and generated billions in exports.
Here’s the catch, however. While Reeves may be right in her diagnosis, her solution is hopelessly inadequate.
How does she plan to encourage risk-taking? Is she going to abolish a regulator or two? Will she repeal one or two pieces of legislation? Will she reduce reporting requirements, or capital buffers, or – and everyone should take a deep breath before mentioning this – perhaps even cut a tax or two?
Er, not exactly. It turns out that the Chancellor has sent “remit letters”, whatever the heck they are, to the five main City regulators, instructing them to focus more on growth. Oh, and she plans to commission a “financial services growth and competitiveness strategy” to be published some time next year.
Seriously? That’s it. If Reeves was even a quarter as clever as she keeps claiming to be, she might twig that the fact she was sending her remit letters to five – yes, five – regulators might be part of the problem.
Why five? Wouldn’t four be sufficient, or even three. And anyone who imagines that yet another government-led strategy was the answer to anything is surely deluding themselves.
In reality, Reeves has not even come close to matching the ambition of her predecessor, Jeremy Hunt, with his Edinburgh Reforms earlier this year. Even that package was very timid. She is tinkering around the edges, commissioning reports and scolding the regulators, instead of actually doing anything.
On the other side of the Atlantic, president-elect Trump is about to show what allowing greater risk-taking genuinely looks like.
The details are still a little sketchy, as they so often are with Trump, but Wall Street expects capital ratios to be loosened, allowing the banks to lend more aggressively, especially to businesses, and for the heads of all the main competition agencies to be replaced, ushering in a wave of deal-making as it becomes possible for acquisitions to go ahead once again.