Over my 38 years in the investment business I have experienced six banking crises, starting with the UK secondary banking collapse of the mid-1970s.

Since then I have witnessed the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the American savings and loan debacle, problems in Scandinavia in the early 1990s and later that decade in Asia. The recent global banking crisis is not without precedent. Such blow-ups are not unique to the past 40 years, either: anyone who has studied the long-term financial history of the developed world will know that it is peppered with similar events. The recent crisis was certainly the worst I’ve seen but I doubt it will be the last.