When James Gorman, chief executive of Morgan Stanley, announced last year that rebuilding the investment bank’s fixed-income sales and trading business was the firm’s number-one priority, some might be forgiven for thinking there was an echo at the bank’s Times Square headquarters.

Morgan Stanley was, after all, the investment bank that piled into fixed income, proprietary trading, derivatives and structured products in 2005 under John Mack in an attempt to close the gap on its Wall Street rivals, an effort that ended in near-collapse and more than $9bn losses in sub-prime mortgages.