"Guess who I had in the back of my cab," is a refrain familiar to Londoners. "Not an investment banker," might now be an appropriate response.
Taxi drivers who used to queue up en masse outside JPMorgan's offices on Victoria Embankment were bemused when trade dried up.
But is this more evidence of the hard times in banking? No - without telling the trusty cabbies who used to drive them home at all times of the night, the investment bankers upped sticks and moved a mile across the City to their new home in Aldermanbury, the former home of Flemings, pre-Chase takeover.
Nowadays the Victoria Embankment office is home to JPMorgan Investor Services and clearly bankers from that division don't offer such good trade. As one says: "I got into a taxi and the driver was telling me how long he'd been waiting to get a fare. I hardly had the heart to tell him all the investment bankers had gone."
There's nothing like a grapevine though. The next day the taxis had all pushed off.