On the morning of September 15 2008, Nadia-Elisabeth Seemuth, an analyst in Lehman Brothers’ fixed income division, heard that her employer had filed for bankruptcy. She remembers looking at the office walls, thinking: “It doesn’t exist any more. The whole thing. It’s a sham.”

The bank’s collapse — one of the largest bankruptcies in history — changed the direction of her career. She retrained as a lawyer and worked at Clifford Chance. Yet even a huge “magic circle” law firm, she reasoned, could “stop in a heartbeat”. Friends who have not been through the same experience, Ms Seemuth says, do not imagine it could happen to them.