Last week the world’s stock markets continued their frenzied orgy of value creation and destruction. World leaders huddled in Paris and Washington, desperate to construct a new financial order out of the chaos. The future of capitalism itself seemed in doubt.

But just outside Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a golden Sunday evening, a trio of young classical musicians filled the air with sweet melodies as alumni of Harvard Business School sipped champagne and chatted fondly about old times. A photograph of the scene in HBS’s handsome Baker library that evening would have had to be labelled: “Crisis, what crisis?”