Ever since Lehman Brothers collapsed almost five years ago – the most dramatic event in an unprecedented global crisis that is still reverberating today – policy makers have laboured to fix the causes of that disaster and to pre-empt the next. Have they succeeded?

In an attempt to gauge the merit of the glut of global reforms, the Financial Times has looked back at the 34 main banks and brokers that failed in the crisis, judging the principal reasons for failure from a menu of five – low capital; weak funding structures; poor lending; poor trading investments; and misguided mergers and acquisitions. Many failed for multiple reasons, though Royal Bank of Scotland is the only institution to which all five triggers applied.

Any analysis of the precise causes of the global financial crisis, even after five years of reflection, is necessarily subjective. But if there were five main causes of failure, regulators can claim at least partial victory on four of them. Capital levels in the system are more than three times higher than they were before the crisis as banks pre-empt the requirements of new Basel III global standards. Financing is more stable, with far less reliance on risky short-term market funding and new incoming rules demanding banks hold minimum levels of cash and safe assets.