It sometimes feels as though my two decades as a financial journalist have been spent, first in London and then in New York, watching investment banks either collapse or be acquired: Barings, SG Warburg, JPMorgan, Bear Stearns, and now Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.

This Sunday was different, however, because it marked not simply the end of Lehman and surrender of Merrill, but the last gasp of the independent investment bank itself. Morgan Stanley opened on Wall Street on Monday September 16 1935 and, 73 years later, almost to the day, the institution of the broker-dealer died.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the last hold-outs among Wall Street's independent investment banks (although even Morgan Stanley sold out once before, to Dean Witter, in 1997). How long these two will spurn the capital backing of a commercial bank remains to be seen.