In the annals of financial history, the year 2008 stands out like a tarantula on white bread. That was the year the banking industry faced its worst crisis since the Great Depression. Unprecedented rises in real-estate prices during the previous decade seduced bankers into making riskier and riskier mortgage loans. When the housing bubble burst, so did their mortgage portfolios. The banking behemoth Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Others, such as Merrill Lynch and AIG, came within a hair’s breadth of failing as well until the federal government stepped in to rescue banks deemed “too big to fail.”