I was in Manhattan during the January ‘white-out’. Thirty centimetres of snow fell in a few hours: airports closed, it was quite a storm. Looking for a safe and warm port on Sunday afternoon, I decided to try the Morgan Library on 36th Street, quite close to my hotel. The Morgan website told me it was open. I believed it. We tend to think that the Americans manage these things better than we do in London, where an inch of the wrong sort of snow shuts down public transport. But after struggling through six blocks of snowdrifts, I was disappointed. Like most Italian art galleries, it was chiuso. 

It seemed a bad omen. The newspapers were full of Trump’s war on the Federal Reserve, and indeed on J P Morgan, who dared close his account when the President left office the first time. It was all a far cry from the days before the Fed was founded (only in 1913) when John Pierpont Morgan bestrode the American financial system from his office in what is now the library. During the Panic of 1907, triggered by a failed attempt to corner the copper market, he invited the lions of Wall Street into his den, locked the doors and pocketed the key, insisting that he would not let them out until they had agreed a collective market bailout. 

There is no doubt a degree of poetic licence to this story, but it was the crisis that caused Congress and the President to agree that a central bank was needed to manage such episodes, which had made Morgan exceedingly rich indeed. He did very well by doing good, as