The first time I ran into the “Morgan mafia” - or, more accurately, the ex-JPMorgan mafia - was at a banking conference in Nice last year. It was, I later learned, the type of ritual typical of high finance: around a plush, darkened lecture theatre and well-stocked bar, a gaggle of suited men (and the occasional woman) earnestly muttered about “delta hedging”, “correlation risk” or “CDO squared”.

For all I could tell, they might have been discussing nuclear physics or ancient Chinese. What distinguished this meeting from those topics, however, was the whiff of money: these people might have looked like nerds, but they sported very expensive watches, and their chat was peppered with casual references to billions of dollars.