Indeed, for several years ahead, I can see ourselves furiously debating the famous counterfactual, "If Lehman had not been allowed to fail, …..". However, if only we look a little deeper, we will trace the origins of the crisis to the build up of global imbalances during the 90s and this first decade of this century.
In the first half of 2019, there was an increase in profitability of the Portuguese banking system. The return on equity (ROE) in June 2019 was 8.4%, compared with 6% of the average of significant institutions supervised by the Single Supervisory Mechanism3 .