WHEN JAMES GORMAN took the helm at Morgan Stanley it was barely afloat. His tenure as the bank’s chief executive began on January 1st 2010, in the teeth of the global financial crisis. After the failure of Lehman Brothers, in 2008, fear had spread that other dominoes would soon topple. Morgan Stanley seemed a likely candidate. Hank Paulson, then treasury secretary, is rumoured to have offered it up to JPMorgan Chase for free (Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s boss, apparently declined). The firm then accepted a government bailout. In 2009 its return on equity, a benchmark measure of profitability, was just 4%.