Hanging in Steve Schwarzman's office in Park Avenue, Manhattan, is a 17th-century painting of the Battle of Texel, a naval clash in which the Dutch resisted an Anglo-French fleet seeking to win control over the Spanish Netherlands.

On the seas of modern capitalism, Mr Schwarzman, co-founder of Blackstone and one of the private-equity industry's biggest deal-makers, has ambitions worthy of a territorially-minded European monarch of yore. With Pete Peterson, a former US commerce secretary who for 11 years headed Lehman Brothers, Mr Schwarzman has built Blackstone into a formidableempire that intertwines merchant banking with private equity, real estate, hedge funds and corporate debt.