Surviving the Lehman collapse 10 years on

An iconic picture from September 11, 2008 — the day employees at Lehman Brothers' London office in the financial district of Canary Wharf were called together. The photograph caught the moment Gwion Moore, one of those pictured in the photograph, and his colleagues were told by bosses that things were going to be OK. At the time, the Lehman Brothers share price was tanking by the minute.

Gwion Moore now works in his native Australia. He recalls the contrast between the growing panic in financial markets over the fate of the stricken firm with the mood inside the building at the time. "It was almost a festival atmosphere at the bank. We weren't doing any business. But people were still coming to work and just chatting to each other."

Restaurant worker Jose Manuel Abel smokes a cigarette as he waits to catch a flight from Barcelona to Munich, Germany. Abel said farewell to his wife and children and left after he couldn't find a job in his native Spain due to the crisis.

Eric Lipps, then 52, waits in line to enter the NYCHires job fair in New York City on December 9, 2009. The fallout of Lehman's collapse led to big unemployment in vast sectors of the economy. Especially the bankers found the transition to the non-financial sector quite painful.

Eric Lipps was one of the lucky ones. A few months after losing his job he was hired as a child support enforcement officer in New York, a job he still holds. Here he is shown outside 4 World Trade Center on August 17, a decade after he was pictured in line at a jobs fair. "Mercifully I had money so I wasn't going to be hand to mouth," Lipps said. .

Tsutomu Fukasawa (right), a foreign exchange dealer, with a colleague at Tokyo Forex & Ueda Harlow, 10 years on from Lehman's collapse. After the crisis, some of the firm's customers left the market, but Fukasawa says Japan's economy is recovering lost ground. "The Japanese economy suffered a big hit, but it is slowly but surely catching up with the global financial market."

Former UK finance minister, Alistair Darling, was in charge of the British economy as the financial crisis escalated. Now a member of the upper house of Parliament, he says the decision by the Conservative-led government in 2010 to try to wipe the country's budget deficit in five years extended the economic slowdown. "What is commonly called austerity has prolonged the downturn."

Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp. But the Washington-Wall Street revolving door keeps turning and many Wall Street stars have managed to claw their way into the highest reaches of government, including many involved in Lehman brothers at the time of its collapse in 2008, the country's largest bankruptcy in its history.