Early 2010, a gathering of business leaders in Switzerland. Mounting anger with the banks among industrial chief executives, who are beginning to feel that the financial sector’s rich blend of incompetence and incontinence threatens to make the entire capitalist system unacceptable to the public. The nearly new chairman of UBS – the most egregious Swiss culprit – is present, a former government minister of impeccable unbankerly credentials. He explains that UBS can do nothing whatever to change its business model, or to reduce compensation substantially, without putting itself at a severe competitive disadvantage.

Enter a speaker from the Swiss National Bank. “We Swiss are farmers, not hunter-gatherers. The asset management business suits our character as well as our historical position. Your investment banking business, though, has never made a penny for your shareholders and has put the whole country at risk. All the value added it creates goes to its employees, most of whom live in London and New York. We would rather you were not in that business.”

If only central bankers had spoken like that earlier, you might think, we might have been spared some trouble. But for nearly three years the bank largely ignored this excellent advice. Only this week, several chairmen and chief executives later, and presumably having exhausted every other conceivable possibility, UBS belatedly began the serious work of dismantling its investment bank. Ten thousand jobs are going, for starters; this is no small matter.