It could get worse, of course. The markets, I mean. “The worst is not/So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst’,” as Edgar cheerfully points out in King Lear.

Several big institutional investors expect to see another major banking collapse. A survey of 146 of them, carried out recently by Greenwich Associates, the US financial services consultancy, found that almost 60 per cent believed another failure would take place within the next six months.