Bear Stearns holds a special place in the story of the credit crunch. When the investment bank was rescued from bankruptcy by JP Morgan in March 2008 – a full six months before Lehman Brothers went down – it wiped billions of dollars off the net worth of thousands of Bear Stearns staff, and fired the starting gun on the acute phase of the financial crisis.

Yet, it wasn't a disaster for everyone. Many of the bank's former senior executives have done well for themselves since. Former chief executive Alan Schwartz is now chairman at Guggenheim Partners; the former chief financial officer Sam Molinaro runs the non-core assets division at UBS; and the former co-heads of fixed income, Jeff Mayer and Craig Overlander, are now the respective heads in the US at Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale.