The metamorphosis of Macquarie continues. Throughout its 40-year history, the Australian financial services group has bucked and shimmied according to fashion: in the fiscal year to March, two-fifths of operating income came from businesses it wasn’t in five years earlier. This year, it has disentangled itself from racy activities that had become near-synonymous with the brand – the buying, pooling and spinning off of assets into listed, Macquarie-managed funds. Meanwhile, it has bolted on as many dull advisory businesses as it can lay its hands on.

The noise surrounding these satellite funds has always been disproportionate, given that they yielded 14 per cent of operating income before writedowns last year. But Macquarie simply had too much skin in the game. It does not take a genius to observe that the purest agency businesses – Goldman Sachs in the US, Nomura in Japan – have outperformed in recent months. In this muted environment, finding ways to wedge yourself into other people’s transactions is always preferable to doing your own.