It is 7.30am at the St Regis Hotel in New York and the Astor Court, where breakfast is served, is almost deserted. The St Regis is a staid Midtown hotel built in 1904 that sits between Fifth and Madison avenues. Many of the staff appear to be only slightly younger than the hotel itself. When David Bonderman, irreverent billionaire co-founder of buy-out firm TPG (formerly Texas Pacific Group), saunters in, the underemployed staff scurry over to greet him by name. Bonderman always stays in the St Regis when he passes through New York. He says it is because he is loyal (although he later tells me that loyalty to the undeserving is his biggest flaw) and because they unpack his bags for him.

This is going to be a swift meeting: the end of the buy-out boom has hardly slowed TPG, and Bonderman is going on from our breakfast to Wall Street. In April, the firm led a $7bn infusion into troubled Washington Mutual, the largest savings and loan bank in the US. Last month, it injected £180m into Bradford & Bingley, the largest lender to landlords in Britain. During the first week of June, TPG and Goldman Sachs sold Alltel, a cellular telecoms group, to Verizon Wireless and made $1.3bn on the sale, having held the company for a mere seven months. TPG also became the envy of its peers when the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange gave the company almost $3bn to manage, the largest-ever single allocation to a US private equity firm.