Nearly a year after the credit crunch became a full-blown crisis, its impact is beginning to move from the abstract of hundreds of billions of dollars in writedowns to the more prosaic day-to-day business of investment banks.

Amid intense debate over whether the worst of the crisis is over and whether the model for investment banks that has seen them enjoy outsize returns for nearly 20 years is broken, one thing has become clear. The liberal approach to capital allocation and the return on that capital is over, and investment banks are focusing more on every dollar of capital that they deploy.