As news of a possible bail-out of the monoline industry trickled out on Wednesday night, one senior investment banker in Davos sent an urgent message to his junior staff: crunch the numbers to work out whether this makes financial sense for the banks – or not.

The answer? “We are still running the metrics,” he told me yesterday. “But we think that injecting capital would be cheaper for the banks than making write-offs [against a monoline downgrade]. We would seriously consider taking part.”