Kristine Braden moved to Frankfurt to start her new job leading Citigroup’s post-Brexit European business on 10 March, exactly one week before Germany went into coronavirus lockdown.

Scrambling to secure an apartment, she also embraced what the locals call hamsterkauf — a peculiar German phrase to imply panic buying food, just as the rodent stuffs as many morsels as possible into its cheeks. “I actually packed a little extra, because having been through SARS in Hong Kong in 2003, I kind of knew the drill. I anticipated Covid-19 would come crashing down, and it did,” she says, speaking over the phone from Citi’s Frankfurt headquarters as one of the 20% of the bank’s employees to no longer be working remotely.