A year can be a long time in investment banking. Sergio Ermotti, chief executive of UBS, may have been tempting fate a few months ago when he declared the restructuring of the investment bank was “mission accomplished”, but its first full year of numbers seems to have proved the sceptics – including this one – wrong.

Instead of leading to a slow death by a thousand cuts, the decision in late 2012 to slash assets, risk-weighted assets and equity in the investment bank by roughly two thirds and to pull out of large parts of fixed income altogether has transformed the economics of the business.