 The American financial system had broken in late 2008 after the investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed. That moment marked a threshold for people like Tom Honeck. Economists and central bankers described the ensuing panic as the global financial crisis, eventually bestowing the moment with its own biblical label, the GFC. The world of central banking was neatly divided into two eras. There was the world pre-GFC and the world post-GFC. The GFC itself was apocalyptic.