Early in his career, Marc Rowan, co-founder of Apollo Global, worried that he had missed the greatest windfalls in finance.

“I remember getting out of business school in 1984 and thinking ‘God, I am just too late’,” Rowan once said of his early days as an associate at Drexel Burnham Lambert. “‘All the money’s already been made.’”

The hard-charging investment bank led by “junk bond king” Michael Milken fuelled the 1980s era of financial risk taking before it spiralled into bankruptcy in 1990. But Rowan’s moment to make serious money would eventually come almost two decades later. Shortly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, he delivered a speech to young financiers in which he declared: “You want chaos, you want everything shaken up, you want the system to be brought down and rebuilt again. This is a time of incredible opportunity.”