In the first week of March Michael Collins attended Harvard Business School for a three-day programme to analyse the economic crisis. As an executive vice-president at the Federal Reserve Bank, Mr Collins says the beauty of the programme was that he could mix with entrepreneurs and managers from industry and government. “What I expected to get out of the programme was something about how people outside the banking system viewed the crisis.”

The timeliness of the programme did not disappoint. “You have to learn as fast as the world is changing around you.”

The programme is one of a number that Harvard, ranked number one in executive programmes for the second year in a row by the Financial Times, launched in response to the economic crisis. The US school is not alone. Over the next two days, some 40 executives will gather at Fontainebleau near Paris hoping to learn from professors at Insead how to decipher the crisis.