For the last few months investment bankers specialising in financial institutions have been buzzing with talk about big European bank deals. And they didn’t mean Clydesdale and Yorkshire bidding for Virgin Money. Really big deals.

Now it seems that it is not just the bankers who are talking. The other day it was revealed that Barclays was studying the spreadsheets on a number of hypothetical mergers, including Standard Chartered. And on Sunday it was reported that Societe Generale and UniCredit are thinking about a deal, though SocGen insisted there had been no board discussions.