Europe's high yield market reaches its fourth anniversary this month. That fact alone defies the sceptics who, back in 1997 and 1998, scorned the idea that junk bonds could ever thrive anywhere but in the gung-ho capital markets of the US.

Instead junk has become an integral part of the brave new world of credit markets in Europe, with hundreds of practitioners often earning salaries as wildly inflated as those in any established asset class.