A knowledgeable reader of my last column has chided me gently on a popular investment website for what he calls the “superficial profundity” of my suggestion that we may be entering a period of boring consolidation during which banks will no longer be regarded as growth stocks. This charming rebuke led me to laugh out loud although not perhaps for the obvious reason.

Any commentator asked to opine regularly on trends in the financial markets knows there is strictly no defence to the reader’s charge, except to say it sounds an awful lot better than “profound superficiality”, which is presumably the alternative and is, many might argue, a bulk commodity on Wall Street and in the Square Mile as well as the media.