A “strategic acceleration from a position of strength” sounds a lot better than a “humiliating retreat after more than a decade of strategic failure”. But the carefully chosen wording of UBS’s announcement about the radical restructuring of its investment bank can’t hide the fact that the Swiss bank – and many of its rivals – has been in denial for years.

By closing down most of its sub-scale fixed-income division, shifting three quarters of its risk-weighted assets into a non-core unit that will be wound down over three years, and firing around one third of the staff in the investment bank, UBS has finally accepted that it cannot compete at the top table of an industry whose economics have been shot by a sustained downturn in activity and regulatory reform.